Chicago, Judy (1939- ) , American sculptor and installation artist, whose activism since the early 1970s, both as an artist and as an educator, has helped promote feminist principles through art. Chicago’s best-known work, The Dinner Party (1974-1979), is a traveling installation in the form of a triangular table with elaborate place settings for 39 women, characters from both history and mythology, each of whom have been important to Western cultural history and who Chicago felt had received insufficient recognition.

The artist was born in Chicago with the name Judy Cohen, and exhibited an early talent for art, attending classes at the Art Institute of Chicago while in elementary school and high school. She later studied at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she received her M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts) degree in 1964. In 1970 she changed her name to Judy Chicago after her hometown.

Chicago’s earliest works were abstract geometric sculptures that met with little critical success. In 1970 she accepted a position at California State University at Fresno, where she developed the first feminist art program in the United States—advocating art that expresses a distinctly female perspective. The following year she helped establish a similar program at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. In 1972, with the assistance of students from that program and in collaboration with American artists Miriam Schapiro and Faith Wilding, she created the Womanhouse project, a complex piece involving the renovation of a dilapidated house and the creation of art installations and performances within the house (seeInstallation Art; Performance Art).
From her initial conception of The Dinner Party in 1974 to its completion in 1979, Chicago supervised the efforts of scores of women who helped create each customized place setting, practicing crafts traditionally associated with women, such as needlework and decorative painting on china. More than 100 women helped create runners for each place setting, while Chicago designed porcelain plates with motifs appropriate to each of the party’s honored guests. The monumental table, 14.2 meters (46.5 feet) long on each of its three sides, stands on a raised platform covered with 2,300 tiles. The tiles are inscribed with the names of an additional 999 significant women in history. Among the 39 women honored with a place setting are the 12th-century queen consort of England and France, Eleanor of Aquitaine; French poet Christine de Pisan; Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi; and modern American artist Georgia O’Keeffe. The Dinner Party toured the United States from 1979 to 1980 and is still owned by Chicago.

Since The Dinner Party, Chicago has collaborated on other multimedia art installations, including The Birth Project (1983), a series of 85 needlework panels showing pregnant women, women giving birth, and symbols of motherhood. The Holocaust Project (1993), another major work, is a collection of photographs, tapestries, paintings, and texts about the Holocaust, the mass killing of Jews and other minorities during World War II (1939-1945). Both works have been published in book form.