the Governor's Arts Award Winners

Judy Chicago

Belen

2011 Recipient, Individual Artist

Judy Chicago lives in Belen with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman. As an artist, author, educator, and feminist her career spans over four decades. Her work has been widely exhibited in the United States, as well as in Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. With undergraduate and graduate degrees in art from the University of California-Los Angeles, Chicago turned her energy to women's history in 1974, and started to create her most recognized work - The Dinner Party. This large-scale, multimedia project, includes weaving, china painting, ceramics, and needlework, and is a symbolic history of women in Western Civilization. The Dinner Party has been seen by more than a million viewers during sixteen exhibitions at venues in six countries, and is now on permanent display in the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Other high-profile Judy Chicago ventures include the Birth Project, a series of birth and creation images for needlework, originally exhibited in more than 100 venues and now in the collection of the Albuquerque Museum. In 1978, Chicago founded the nonprofit Through the Flower to serve the general public, especially K-12 schools, with educational programs that communicate the power of art through exhibitions, workshops, seminars, and lectures, as well as a website and study center. The New Mexico Museum of Art holds more than twenty of Chicago's works in its collection.