Feminist, artist, educator, writer. Born Judy Cohen on July 20, 1939, in Chicago, Illinois. Judy Chicago, is a leading figure in feminist art who rose to fame in the 1970s. She attended the University of California, Los Angeles in the early 1960s, earning both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from this institution. Chicago worked as a painting instructor at several California universities before gaining recognition for her own creative work. And creative she was! Judy Chicago's most famous piece of art is The Dinner Party. The Dinner Party comprises a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history. The settings consist of embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils, and china-painted porcelain plates with raised central motifs that are based on vulvar and butterfly forms and rendered in styles appropriate to the individual women being honored. The names of another 999 women are inscribed in gold on the white tile floor below the triangular table.
Her marriage to photographer Donald Woodman and their joint realization that they were utterly ignorant about both their Jewish heritage and the subject of the Holocaust plunged the couple into an eight year attempt to understand the evil and cruelty that live so close under the surface of civilization. In the long and difficult process of creating the Holocaust Project, Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman produced a large body of ancillary work – both together and separately.
