Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago vividly depicted women’s history and women’s experiences through sculpture, paintings, and installation art that involved hundreds of collaborators. Chicago helped develop the Fresno Feminist Art Program, whose 1972 exhibition, Womanhouse, involved female art students completely transforming a house into an environment that expressed their personal experiences and identities as women. Soon after this, Chicago became aware of the absence of women’s stories from history and began research on important women who had been neglected by historians. This culminated in her monumental art installation, The Dinner Party, where hundreds of volunteers helped craft individual place settings and vaginal-shaped ceramic plates to commemorate historical and mythological heroines. The Dinner Party is on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum. Chicago’s next major work, The Birth Project, involved images of women in labor, which Chicago felt was a central experience for women that was completely missing from the artistic canon. Her Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light, explored the abuse of power through mixed media installation. Chicago continues to create art, working in the medium of glass since 2003.