Viewing The grand dame of feminist art, Judy Chicago, finally gets a major retrospective in London

Judy Chicago’s most famous work is that dinner service, a game-changing installation work (now permanently on show at the Brooklyn Museum) that commemorated the lives and contributions of 1038 women. Although The Dinner Party (1974 – 1979) won’t be at this big Serpentine show on Chicago, a previously unpublished, illuminated manuscript Chicago penned around the same time lends its title and structure to the shape of this show. The manuscript will also be published for the first time to coincide with it.

From never-seen-before works dug up from Chicago’s vast archive, to her famous smoke and firework filled performance pieces of the 1960s and 1970s, when she was training at an auto-body school in California, to long term projects such as Birth Project and PowerPlay this exhibition – Chicago’s largest at a British institution – traces the trajectory of an artist who has ceaselessly experimented with mediums, and ways of making and presenting art.

As an artist who has always looked as much to the future as redressing the past, this show will also see an AR app, a video recording booth and audio-visual components added to the mix here too, a way to engage with and give access to more visitors. “I believe in art that is connected to real human feeling that extends itself beyond the limits of the art world to embrace all people who are striving for alternatives in an increasingly dehumanized world”, Chicago once said.