Chicago, Judy

Important Works

Chicago's most famous work is The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (1974-79), which traces a symbolic history of women in Western civilization. The artwork features a triangular banquet table laid with dinner places, each designated for an eminent woman in history. The embroidered place mats and ceramic plates take on vulvar forms. The Dinner Party is often referred to in discussions about female iconographies in art. Inspired by 1970s feminism, in this piece Chicago employs the universal language of the goddess to create abstract and stylized representations of female bodies, especially female genitalia. The Dinner Party is significant in its use of vaginal forms, or what Chicago terms central core imagery, which offers an alternative to the phallus.

Following from the embroidered place mats in The Dinner Party, needlework has played a significant role in Chicago's work. In her needlework projects, Chicago draws on the traditional image of sewing as a woman's art form, but she also creates a community of empowered women by employing female needleworkers to decorate her feminist motifs. For The Birth Project (1980-85), Chicago designed images of childbirth inspired by the testimony of mothers. Later, these images were embellished by needleworkers from the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. Resolutions: A Stitch in Time (1994-2004) again drew on a community of skilled women stitchers, but needlework was used here to embellish Chicago's paintings. The overall aim of this piece was to reframe English proverbs because, according to Chicago, they usually offer only a narrow, white, male, Eurocentric perspective.

In recent collaborations, Chicago has turned to issues that are beyond the specificity of gender, although they are still related to the abuse of women. One such collaboration was The Holocaust Project (1985-93), in which Chicago turned to the question of her own Jewishness, combining her paintings with Donald Woodman's photography. Chicago and Woodman treat the Holocaust as the apex for issues surrounding the human condition, the idea being that the artists are “carriers of empathy.” Chicago also wanted to address the interaction between sexism and racism in the Holocaust.

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