Chicago, Judy

Chicago, Judy (Judy Gerowitz Chicago) (gĕr`əwĭts', shĭkä`gō, –kô`–), 1939–, American artist, b. Chicago as Judy Cohen. A feminist and founder of the Women's Art Education collective, she works in a variety of media, including such historically female crafts as needlework and china painting. Her best-known work, The Dinner Party (1974–78), is a sexually explicit multimedia installation executed by Chicago and a group of craftswomen. An iconic feminist work that pays tribute to 39 notable women and their historically significant contributions to civilization (and also includes the names of 999 lesser known women), it became part of the Brooklyn Museum of Art collection in 2002. Subjects explored in her later projects have included childbirth, women's perception of men, and the Holocaust.

Bibliography

See her autobiographical Through the Flower (1975, rev. ed. 1982) and Beyond the Flower (1996).

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Chicago, Judy

 orig. Judy Cohen

(born July 20, 1939, Chicago, Ill., U.S.) U.S. multimedia artist. She studied at UCLA, and in 1970 she adopted the name of her hometown. Motivated by perceived discrimination in the art world and alienation from canonical art traditions, she developed “environments” featuring feminine imagery. Her most notable work, The Dinner Party (1974–79), is a triangular table with place settings for 39 important women, each represented by personalized ceramic plates and table runners embellished with embroidery styles typical of their eras. This installation established her reputation as a leader in feminist art. In 1973 she cofounded the Feminist Studio Workshop and Woman's Building in Los Angeles.

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Chicago, Judy (b. Judith Cohen Gerowitz) (1939–  ) painter; born in Chicago. A feminist painter, she is most famous for her room-sized installation of Dinner Party Project (1979), a vision of a female Last Supper, which used several mediums including ceramics and woven materials. This well-attended traveling exhibit created controversy, but was acclaimed by many critics.