Judy Chicago
Visualizing Birth

May 23 2016

Judy Chicago is an artist, feminist, humanist, educator and author whose career spans over four decades. She is a founder of the Feminist Art Movement. Throughout her career, she uses art as a vehicle for women’s rights to engage in the highest level of art production for intellectual transformation and social change. 

Her five-year Birth Project especially caught my attention. Few images of birth exists in Western art. A puzzling omission considering birth is a central focus of many women’s lives and a universal experience of all humanity — as everyone is born. Seeking to fill this void, Judy Chicago created multiple images of birth using needlework, a visually rich medium usually ignored or trivialized by the mainstream art community.

Below I made a selection of her oeuvre (starting with the Birth Project) and on her website there’s much more to find.