The Trailblazer.

You may know her as a key player in the feminist movement, but Judy Chicago is much, much more. Think innovators and early adopters – then go one step earlier, and you’ll find Chicago. She is a pioneer who sees art as language. And like any language, she believes art can be learned, it must be used and maintained, and it must evolve. Chicago is an artist, author of 14 books, and educator whose work shouts out for women’s rights to freedom of expression. She founded a feminist art and art education program in California in the early 1970s, then created ‘The Dinner Party’: an epic installation now housed at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at New York’s Brooklyn Museum. From 1974 to 1979, she painstakingly arranged the 39 place settings that make up the artwork – places for prehistoric goddesses, women in Christianity and the Reformation, and early revolutionaries such as Virginia Woolf and Georgia O’Keeffe. It’s the ultimate can’t-miss dinner party, and Judy Chicago is the ultimate powerhouse host.