Judy Chicago (born 1939) is an artist and author of sixteen books. Her career spans more than half a century which time she has produced a prodigious body of art that has been exhibited all over the world. In the 1970s, 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 at 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 mortality and humankind's relationship to and destruction of the
Earth in The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction. 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.
