Judy Chicago (born 1939, Chicago IL) is an artist and author of sixteen books. Her career spans almost six decades during which time she has produced a prodigious body of art that has been exhibited all over the world. In the 1970’s, she pioneered feminist art and feminist art education in a series of programs in southern California. She is best known for her monumental work, The Dinner Party, a symbolic history of women in Western Civilization executed between 1974-79, which is now permanently housed as the centerpiece of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

Subsequent bodies of work have addressed issues of birth and creation in the Birth Project; the construct of masculinity in PowerPlay; the horrors of genocide in the Holocaust Project which she collaborated on with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman; and most recently, mortality and humankind’s relationship to and destruction of the Earth in The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction.

Her work is in numerous collections and her ongoing influence continues to be acknowledged worldwide. Over the course of her career Chicago has remained steadfast in her commitment to the power of art as a vehicle for intellectual transformation and social change and to women’s right to engage in the highest level of art production. Her first retrospective was hosted in 2021 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. A second major retrospective, Herstory, opened at the New Museum in New York in the fall of 2023. In 2024, Herstory toured to the Luma Foundation in Arles, France and a third retrospective, Revelations, opened at Serpentine in London. In 2025, Revelations has toured to Kunsthalle Recklinghausen in Germany and will travel to the Jewish Museum, Amsterdam, in 2026.

Photo credit: Judy Chicago, 2024, © Chicago Woodman LLC, Donald Woodman/Artists Rights Society, New York