This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  An artist focused on feminist issues with a goal of promoting more respect for women, Judy Chicago is best known for her famous installation exhibit called Dinner Party, a monumental testament to women's collective histories. Much of her work is collaborative including a major exhibition that opened in May, 2000 at the American Craft Museum in New York and titled "Resolutions for the Millennium: A Stitch in Time."
Dinner Party, begun in 1974 and finished in 1978, involved more than 100 women in the execution and combined sculpture, ceramics, china painting and needlework. It was an equilateral triangle 48 feet wide with 39 place settings, each specially designed to be appropriate for a particular woman to whom it was dedicated. Many of these women were important figures in history such as the Hatshepsut, the Egyptian Pharoah, and writer Virginia Woolf. Names of 999 women were inscribed on the floor. Dinner Party attracted some of the largest crowds ever to attend a museum exhibition when it was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in April 1978.
In 2003, Dinner Party was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, through its purchase and donation by museum trustee Elizabeth Sackler. In 2007, the work was installed in a triangular room in the museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.
Judy Chicago was born Judith Cohen in Chicago, and was raised in a family of hard working people where women were equal. In 1960, she moved to California and received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles.
She has been an assistant professor at California State University where, angered by what she perceived as sexism, she set up the first feminist art course in the nation. Then she and Miriam Schapiro established the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts. In 1970, she changed her last name to Chicago. She later settled her studio in Balen, New Mexico.
Sources:
Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists
Janet Koplos, "The Dinner Party Revisited", Art in America, May 2003
Hilarie M. Sheets, "Getting the Party Started", ARTnews, February 2007
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Biography from LewAllen Galleries at the Santa Fe Railyard:
| Judy Chicago is well known for the convention shattering nature of her work in such monumental, collaborative projects as The Dinner Party, Birth Project, Holocaust Project and Resolutions: A Stitch in Time.
As an artist, author, feminist, educator and intellectual whose career
now spans more than four decades, she has been a leader and model for
an artist’s right to express freely his or her core identity, for a
definition of fine art that encompasses craft techniques, and for the
necessity of an art that seeks to effect social change.
Chicago
has explored an unusually wide range of media over the course of her
career: painting, drawing, printmaking, china-painting, ceramics,
tapestry, needlework, and most recently glass. Her fluency with
diverse media, her commitment to creating content-based art in the
service of social change and her interest in collaboration have led to
her being hailed—most recently in Janson and Janson’s Basic History of Western Art—not only as a founder of the Feminist art movement but also as a forerunner among contemporary Post-Modernists.
A significant milestone in the artist’s career occurred in March 2007 with the opening of The Dinner Party—Chicago’s
iconic masterpiece of Feminist art, created collaboratively with
hundreds of volunteers between 1975 and 1979—in its new permanent
installation as part of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist
Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Before The Dinner Party,
Chicago created the sculpture, drawings and paintings of her Minimalist
period from 1965 to 1973. Recent exhibitions—at The Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art and the Centre Pompidou in Paris—have
recognized her output during these years as a significant contribution
to the direction and focus of Minimalism and, in particular, the
sub-genre known as the Finish Fetish movement.
LewAllen Contemporary exhibited Chicago’s Minimalist work in September to October 2004. Reviews of the exhibition in ARTnews, Art in America and Artforum
have illuminated a continuity between Chicago’s explorations in
Minimalism and her later Feminist work, a point also noted by guest
curator and catalogue essayist Jenni Sorkin. It was in her
Minimalist work that Chicago began developing the “spectral color”
theory that informed nearly all of her subsequent work; and it was
while producing this work that she began using her distinctively
Feminist iconography of circles and octagons with central cores that
appear to be expanding and contracting.
Chicago pioneered
Feminist art and art education in the early 1970s through unique
pro¬grams for women at California State University-Fresno and later
(with Miriam Schapiro) the California Institute of the Arts.
Through collaborative projects such as Womanhouse in Valencia,
California, Chicago helped to initiate a worldwide Feminist art
movement.
Between 1974 and 1979 she created The Dinner Party
with assistance from hundreds of volunteers, including ceramicists,
china painters and needleworkers. From 1980 to 1985 she worked on the Birth Project, a series of birth and creation images designed by Chicago and executed by needleworkers around the country.
She next brought a critical feminist gaze to the gender construct of
masculinity in a personal project entitled Powerplay (1978-1982). A
growing interest in her Jewish heritage led to an eight-year
collaboration with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, on the
Holocaust Project:
From Darkness Into Light (1985-1993), an exhibition in mixed
media that explored issues of power and powerlessness and the choices
humans make to heal or destroy the world. She next collaborated
with skilled needleworkers on a project called Resolutions: A Stitch in Time,
which premiered in 2000. This project combined painting and
needlework in a series of inspiring images that reinter¬preted
traditional adages and proverbs in a modern context. Chicago’s
collaboratively created projects have toured the world reaching
hundreds of thousands of viewers with the powerful messages in her art.
Chicago’s current work explores the expressive potential of glass. She began her explorations in glass with Rainbow Shabbat,
a sixteen-foot triptych in stained glass, which served as the final
image for the traveling exhibition of the Holocaust Project. After
experimenting with carved and painted images on laminated glass, she
began collaborating with the Dobbins Studio of Santa Fe on a series
that involves repeated painting, carving and firing of fused and cast
glass. In 2006 the work premiered as Chicago in Glass in an
exhibition at LewAllen Contemporary, which travels in 2007 to the
Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario.
Chicago is the author of numerous books: Through
the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist, 1975; The Dinner Party: A
Symbol of Our Heritage, 1979; Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner
Party Needlework, 1980; The Birth Project, 1985; Holocaust Project:
From Darkness into Light, 1993; The Dinner Party/Judy Chicago, 1996;
Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist, 1996;
Fragments From The Delta of Venus, 2004; Kitty City: A Feline Book of
Hours, 2005; and The Dinner Party: From Creation to Preservation, 2007.
Judy Chicago: An American Vision,
by Edward Lucie-Smith, provided the first book-length critical
assessment of Chicago’s art on its release in 2000. The first
full-length biography of the artist is Becoming Judy Chicago, by art historian Gail Levin, released in early 2007.
Chicago’s
papers were acquired in 1996 by the Schlesinger Library for the History
of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study,
Harvard University. She has received numerous grants, awards and
honorary degrees; and her work has been collected by museums including
The British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Getty Trust, the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery, the National
Museum of Women in the Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In October 2002 through
January 2003, a comprehensive survey of Chicago’s career was pre¬sented
at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC.
A
number of exhibitions, both national and international, are being held
in 2007 to celebrate important anniversaries and milestones in the
Feminist Art movement. Chicago’s work is prominently featured in many
of these ongoing and future exhibitions, including the major
retrospective survey of Feminist Art called “WACK: Art and the Feminist
Revolution,” which premiered at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary
Art in the spring and then traveled to the National Museum of Women in
the Arts for an exhibition in the fall. |
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