Artist Judy Chicago is best known for her monumental mixed-media sculpture, The Dinner Party, which was first exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979. A symbolic history of women in Western civilization, the piece comprises an enormous triangular table with thirty-nine place settings commemorating women such as the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Sojourner Truth, and Virginia Woolf. The table stands on a tile floor marked with the names of an additional 999 women. A landmark in feminist art, The Dinner Party was controversial for its use of sexual female imagery. Since 1979, the piece has been seen by more than one million people in a variety of venues. On April 18, 2002, The Dinner Party was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum for its permanent collection. The permanent installation opened on March 23, 2007 as the centerpiece of the new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.A descendant of 23 generations of rabbis, including the eighteenth-century Lithuanian rabbi the Gaon of Vilna, Chicago was educated at the Art Institute of Chicago and at UCLA, where she earned a master's degree in 1964. Her work has always explored questions of gender and power. Significantly, many of Chicago's creations have involved the collaborative work of dozens, even hundreds, of women volunteers. Her first major exhibit, Womanhouse (1972), was a joint creation of the members of the Fresno Feminist Art Program, which Chicago created at California State University in 1970.
Born Judy Cohen on July 20, 1939, in Chicago, Illinois, she later broke with patrilineal tradition by adopting the surname Chicago. To explain her seemingly innate belief in herself and her dismissal of sexist stereotypes, Chicago has pointed to the lack of gender bias in her family. An avid Marxist, Chicago's father, Arthur, encouraged his only daughter to participate in the political discussions that pervaded their middle-class home.
Chicago altered her focus when she began to investigate the construction of masculinity and its relationship to power in the painted series Powerplay.This course of inquiry led her to the tragedy of the Holocaust and her realization of the insufficient knowledge she had concerning this event as well as her heritage in general. Settling in New Mexico, Chicago planned to explore her Jewish identity in tandem with her soon-to-be husband, photographer Donald Woodman. By the time they were married on New Year's Eve, 1985, the couple had agreed to join their efforts in order to visually represent the Holocaust-a subject rarely broached in fine art. After years of study, Chicago and Woodman produced The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1985-1993), a mixed-media installation that confronts formidable issues surrounding the abuse of power and its horrific manifestations. Like all of her projects, this one too traveled to a number of venues in the U.S.
In 2001 Chicago completed Resolutions: A Stitch in Time, a series of painted and needleworked images reinterpreting traditional proverbs. By reinterpreting the proverbs, she hopes to "present images of a world transformed into a global community of caring people" (Beyond 262). Indeed, as Chicago suggests, it is the Jewish concept of tikkun-the healing of the world-that consistently motivates her most profound art. It was probably this overriding philosophy which in July 2002 prompted her to travel to China to take part in a five-month long art project in which twelve Chinese women artists and dozens more from all over the world participated in an attempt to answer the question of what our planet could look like "If Women Ruled the World."
In 2003 Duke University awarded Chicago an honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts. In 2004 she received the Visionary Women Award and the International Lion of Judah Conference Award for Pioneering American Women Jewish Artists.
Primary Source: Jewish Women's Archive