In the early 1970s, after a decade of professional art practice, Chicago pioneered feminist art and art education through a unique program for women at California State University, Fresno. She has continued to develop this pedagogical approach over the years.

In 1974, Chicago turned her attention to the subject of women's history to create her most well-known work, The Dinner Party, which was executed between 1974 and 1979 with the participation of 400 volunteers. This monumental multimedia project is a symbolic history of women in Western Civilization. The Dinner Party found a permanent home in 2007 at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

From 1980 to 1985, Chicago worked on the Birth Project. Having observed an absence of iconography on the subject of birth in Western art, Chicago designed a series of birth and creation images for needlework, executed under her supervision by 150 skilled needleworkers around the country.

While completing the Birth Project, Chicago also focused on individual studio work to create PowerPlay. Through drawings, paintings, weavings, cast paper, and bronze reliefs, Chicago brought a critical feminist gaze to the gender construct of masculinity, exploring how definitions of power have affected the world in general, and men in particular.

The artist's long concern with issues of power and a growing interest in her Jewish heritage led Chicago to her next body of work, the Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light, which involved eight years of inquiry, travel, study, and artistic creation. It is comprised of a body of works merging Chicago's painting with the photography of Donald Woodman, as well as works in stained glass and tapestry designed by Chicago and executed by skilled artisans.

Resolutions: A Stitch in Time was Judy Chicago's last collaborative project. Begun in 1994, Resolutions combines painting and needlework that, with an eye to the future, playfully reinterprets traditional adages and proverbs.

In 2011 and 2012, Chicago’s important contributions to southern California art were highlighted in 'Pacific Standard Time', a Getty-funded initiative documenting and celebrating the region’s rich history. This reevaluation of Chicago’s art has led to renewed interest in her work around the United States and Europe.

In 2014, coast-to-coast exhibitions and events celebrated Chicago’s 75th birthday, which culminated in the complex pyrotechnic work A Butterfly for Brooklyn. Over 12,000 people attended this pyro-display in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York.

For more than five decades, Judy Chicago has remained steadfast in her commitment to the power of art as a vehicle for intellectual transformation and social change and to women’s rights to engage in the highest levels of art production.