During the last five decades, Judy Chicago -- artist, author, educator, civic activist -- has built a unique career tackling the cultural and political taboos she faced as a woman and a Jew.

The 70-year-old artist, who rose to fame in the 1970s, is known for her poignant portrayals of women in Holocaust-themed art and for painting in color the horrors of annihilation previously presented only in black and white.

Chicago also created works that called attention to the treatment of slaves, equating their suffering to that of Jews. And she celebrated female sexuality, painting flower-like and fiery silhouettes of genitalia and childbirth scenes that sometimes stirred controversy.

``She comes to her art from an ever-expanding horizon of passions,'' says Laura Kruger, curator of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum in New York and co-curator (with Chicago's biographer Gail Levin) of the compact but poignant retrospective Judy Chicago: Jewish Identity at Miami Beach's Jewish Museum of Florida.

`WOMEN'S WORK'

The show illustrates, via a 20-minute video and an oversized photograph, how Chicago used arts traditionally considered women's work -- needlepoint, embroidery, ceramic plate painting, applique -- to design her iconic work The Dinner Party (1974-79), a room-sized installation of 39 place settings dedicated to women who made a difference in history.

The mammoth, triangular-shaped dinner table is on permanent exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, but the video installation by Chicago's husband Donald Woodman, with a spirited narration by the artist, takes viewers through a virtual tour. Chicago discusses the intricate techniques that went into each setting and the stories of the remarkable women to whom they belong -- including Susan B. Anthony, whom Chicago calls ``the queen at the dinner table.''

The interior of the triangle is filled with thousands of less-famous names flowing in stream-like patterns. These are ``women whose achievements have been lost in history,'' says Chicago, whom Kruger describes as possessing ``a Gilda Radner-like personality.''

Chicago, who lives and works in Belen, N.M., says that while women have come a long way, the arts are still not a level playing field.

``Definitely, there's a lot more room for young women artists to be themselves in their work, which was not possible in my time,'' Chicago says. ``I was told you can't be a woman and an artist, too. It was taboo to bring any imagery into the work about the female experience.''

And, she adds, citing recent statistics, female artists make less money than males -- 60 cents to the dollar for older female artists like herself -- and exhibit less often in major museums. Only 4 percent of the exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art in New York show work by women. Ninety-nine percent of the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is comprised of work by white males.

Chicago has exhibited all over the world -- most recently in South Korea, Calgary and Spain. ``Despite that, my work continues to be omitted from major museums,'' she says. ``My career has always been a good bellwether for where things really are.''

Born Judith Sylvia Cohen in Chicago in 1939, the artist legally changed her name to follow the practice of adopting home as a surname that many intellectuals -- Irving Berlin, Robert Indiana -- turned into a trend. For Chicago, the change was a way to break the patriarchal tradition of passing down the father's name.

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