Judy Chicago's first Dutch solo show puts her Jewish roots at the centre

On 6 February 2026 the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, part of the city's Jewish Cultural Quarter, opened Judy Chicago: Revelations, the American artist's first solo exhibition in the Netherlands. Organised by the Serpentine in London, where it was first shown, and reworked for the Amsterdam museum, it ran until 23 August. Because very few of Chicago's works are held in European collections, much of the show had to be borrowed from the United States.

The exhibition takes its name and structure from an illuminated manuscript Chicago created in the early 1970s while she was beginning The Dinner Party, her monumental installation honouring 1,038 women from history, now permanently displayed at the Brooklyn Museum. The manuscript, which reimagines the story of creation with women at its centre, remained unpublished for half a century until the Serpentine and Thames & Hudson issued it in 2024. Around its chapters the curators assembled early abstract and minimalist pieces, drawings and preparatory studies for The Dinner Party, the Birth Project and PowerPlay, needlework, archival material and video of her Atmospheres performances with coloured smoke in the California desert, along with a booth where visitors could record their own responses. The show was curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Chris Bayley of the Serpentine with Liz Stumpf, and by Judith Hoekstra for the Jewish Museum.

Chicago was born Judith Cohen in Chicago in 1939, into a Jewish family descended from a line of rabbis. The museum presented her Jewish background, with its emphasis on language, creation, justice and recovering forgotten stories, as a fundamental source of her feminist art rather than a side note, a theme she explored directly in her Holocaust Project of the 1980s and 1990s. The setting in a museum of Jewish history in the heart of Amsterdam's old Jewish quarter gave that connection added weight.