Merger

American painter and sculptor Judy Chicago (b. Cohen, later Gerowitz) is a pioneer of feminist art and art education. Known early in her career as a minimalist, she began to emphasize feminist content in her work in the late 1960s. She changed her last name to Chicago, the city of her birth. Beginning in the early 1970s, she was instrumental in establishing feminist art programs for women at California State University–Fresno and the California Institute of the Arts. Her collaborative work The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (1974–1979) is regarded as a foundational work of feminist art and is an example of the mixed media collaborative projects for which she is best known. In 2021, the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco mounted the first retrospective of her work.