Audiotape collection of Judy Chicago, 1968-2001

Judy Chicago, an artist, writer, and feminist, was born Judy Cohen in Chicago, Illinois, July 20, 1939. The daughter of Arthur M., a labor organizer, and May (Levenson) Cohen, a medical secretary, Chicago adopted the surname Chicago in 1969. She was married and widowed by Jerry Gerowitz (1961-1963), married and divorced from Lloyd Hamrol (1969-1979), and has been married to Donald Woodman since 1985.

After receiving her B.A. (1962) and M.F.A. (1964) from the University of California, Los Angeles, Chicago received recognition for her minimalist sculpture through an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1967) and a one-woman show at California State University at Fullerton (1970).

Increasingly sensitive to the need for an environment in which women artists could express themselves freely without regard to an art world dominated by males, Chicago pioneered feminist art education programs through her experience as assistant and founder of the Women's Art Program California State University at Fresno (1969-1971) and as instructor and co-founder of the Feminist Studio Workshop at the California Institute of the Arts (1971-1973). Her experience with the Feminist Art Program culminated in Womanhouse (1971), an installation she directed with the artist Miriam Shapiro. In 1973, Chicago organized the Feminist Studio Workshop, the first independent feminist art program in the country.

Chicago is best known for The Dinner Party (1974-1979), a multi-media installation honoring the achievements of women in Western civilization. Created with the participation of hundreds of volunteers, The Dinner Party was viewed by approximately one million people in exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad between 1979 and 1988. In 1978, Chicago established a non-profit organization, Through the Flower to support the completion of The Dinner Party. Through the Flower continues to this day as an "arts organization whose mission is to create a cultural legacy built upon the vision embodied in the work of Judy Chicago through education, exhibition and preservation" (www.judychicago.com). Since 2002, The Dinner Party has been permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York.

Committed to using art as a vehicle for intellectual and social change, Chicago created The Birth Project (1980-1985), a series of birth and creation images for needlework executed by skilled stitchers around the country, and the Holocaust Project (1984-1993) in collaboration with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman. A frequent lecturer, she is the author of Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (1975), Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist (1996), and a number of books on her work.