Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago (b. 1939, Illinois) is a leader in the Feminist Artist movement and longtime art educator and writer. Well-known for her large installation The Dinner Party (Brooklyn Museum) and her collaborative series The Birth Project, Chicago has dedicated her over six-decade career to examining the role of women throughout history and in our contemporary culture. Chicago's work incorporates a variety of artistic skills, including mediums traditionally deemed as feminine craft, such as needlework, counterbalanced with labor-intensive “masculine” skills, like welding and pyrotechnics.

Chicago earned a BFA and an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles. The artist has published numerous books, including an autobiography and a critical examination of art education. In 2018, Chicago was included in Time’s 100 Most Influential People and in 2021 the de Young Museum in San Francisco hosted the legendary artist’s first retrospective. Her work is in the collections of the British Museum (London), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), National Gallery (Washington DC), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among countless other international collections.

Related Works

• Judy Chicago's Birth Tear/Tear captures the aesthetic of her iconic embroidered and quilted artworks on paper. Lesley Dill also evokes fiber—and challenges viewers to rethink traditional symbols of femininity—in a series of paper dress forms that incorporate hand stitching and printmaking techniques. View her work. 
• In the collection of our sister gallery, form & concept, Thais Mather reflects on the power and pain of the birthing process in a vivid series of figurative watercolors. View her work.