Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939). The Dinner Party, 1974-79. Mixed media: ceramic, porcelain, textile. Details: place settings for, l-r, Anna van Schurman, Margaret Sanger and Natalie Barney, Virginia Woolf, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939). Conceptual Drawing for The Dinner Party, 1975-76, Ink on paper. © Judy Chicago.

Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939), The Dinner Party (Hatshepsut place setting), 1974-79. Mixed media: ceramic, porcelain, textile. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, 2002.10. © Judy Chicago. Photography: Jook Leung Photography.

Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939), The Dinner Party (Artemisia Gentileschi
place setting), 1974-79, Mixed media: ceramic, porcelain, textile. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, © Judy Chicago, Photography Jook Leung Photography.

Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939). The Dinner Party (Georgia O'Keeffe plate), 1974-79. Porcelain with overglaze enamel (China paint). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, © Judy Chicago.

Statuette of a Snake Goddess (front view), Early Aegean, Minoan-Bronze Age, Late Minoan I Period, about 1600-1500 b.c. or early 20th century. Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Mrs. W. Scott Fitz, Image: © 2007 Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston.

Sandra Ogel (American). Ironing, 1972. From Womanhouse, Performance, Photograph courtesy of Through the Flower archive.

Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939). Sojourner Truth Place Setting (detail), The Dinner Party 1974-79, Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation,© Judy Chicago.

Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939). Primordial Goddess Place Setting (detail), The Dinner Party 1974-79, Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation,© Judy Chicago.

Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939). Virginia Woolf Place Setting (detail), The Dinner Party 1974-79, Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation,© Judy Chicago.

Carolee Schneemann (American, b. 1939), Interior Scroll, 1975. Llfachrome
print, © Carolee Schneemann, Photography: Anthony McCall.

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn
718-638-5000
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, 4th Floor
The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago
Ongoing

By MAURA REILLY

Imagine the most powerful and provocative women who have ever lived. Then imagine them sitting down together to share a meal. In that startling, impossible, but extraordinary idea lies the seed of one of the most famous works in the history of American art, Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. With the Grand Opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum on March 23, 2007, The Dinner Party is restored to public view on a permanent basis.

Widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork, the monumental installation functions as a symbolic history of women in Western civilization. Upon entering the installation, a viewer sees 39 elaborate place settings carefully arranged along a massive triangular table. Virginia Woolf, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Theodora of Byzantium are among the guests, as is Hatshepsut, the first female Pharaoh, who is also the focus of a companion exhibition at the new Center. Pharaohs, Queens, and Goddesses, the adjacent exhibition, draws objects relating to Hatshepsut and several other of The Dinner Party’s guests from the Museum’s renowned Egyptian collections in order to explore changing interpretations of Egyptian art and life.

The Dinner Party presents a ceremonial banquet for carefully chosen guests. Arranged on a triangular table measuring forty-eight feet on each side are a total of thirty-nine place settings. The “guests of honor” are designated by means of intricately embroidered runners, each executed in a historically specific manner; upon these are placed, for each setting, a gold chalice and utensils, and a china-painted porcelain plate rendered in a style appropriate to the individual woman being honored. The names of the other 999 women are inscribed in gold on the white tile floor below the triangular table.

Begun in 1974 and finished in 1979, with the help of hundreds of collaborators, The Dinner Party celebrates traditional female accomplishments such as weaving, china painting, embroidery, and sewing, which have historically been framed as craft or domestic art. Why did Judy Chicago title this artwork The Dinner Party? What do you see to support your answer?

The Dinner Party honors the achievement of women over the millennia in craft forms associated with the domestic, or feminine, realm. Each table setting, unique to the woman whose life it honors, includes a hand-painted china plate, ceramic flatware and chalice, and a napkin with an embroidered gold edge. The settings rest upon elaborately embroidered runners, executed in a variety of needlework styles and techniques taken from the periods in which these women lived.

With Chicago wielding the brush, the decorous art of china painting metamorphosed in The Dinner Party into a vehicle for the creation of bold, sensual imagery suggestive of flowers, female genitalia, and butterflies, about which the artist once explained, “My images are about struggling out of containment, reaching out and opening up as opposed to masking or veiling.”

Chicago’s triangular table is configured so that one wing represents women from prehistory through classical Rome, beginning with Primordial Goddess and ending with Hypatia, symbolic of the decline of the classical world. Another wing begins with Marcella, denoting the rise of Christianity, and concludes with the 17th-century Anna van Schurman. The final side begins with Ann Hutchinson, symbolizing the beginning of the American Revolution and modern civilization, and ends with the place settings offering tribute to Virginia Woolf and Georgia O’Keeffe, who represent for the artist that historical moment when women began to find and create a uniquely female voice in literature and in art.

The set dinner table stands on The Heritage Floor, made up of more than 2,000 white luster-glazed triangular-shaped tiles, each inscribed in gold script with the name of one of the 999 women who have made a mark on history. In the installation at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center, the Entrance Banners, Heritage Panels, and an extensive online database dedicated to this iconic work, will help illustrate the contributions of these women and credit the many participants who made possible the realization of The Dinner Party in the 1970s, and today.

Since it was first presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979, The Dinner Party has been seen by more than one million people on three continents. The Brooklyn Museum first displayed the installation in October 1980, the fourth venue in a national tour. Kay Larson, writing for the Village Voice, called it, “The first epic feminist artwork.” Meg Cox in the Wall Street Journal wrote, “Ms. Chicago’s purpose ... was to simultaneously represent women’s accomplishments and their struggles. She wanted the women to be honored guests, but she also wanted to portray them as trapped on the plates, ‘eaten alive,’ since so many of their works and even their names have been erased from history.”

For the first two years of the project (which eventually took more than five years to complete), Judy Chicago worked alone in her Santa Monica workshop conceiving and executing her extraordinary vision. However, the undertaking proved so ambitious that eventually 400 women and men from all over the country became involved, volunteering their time, from a month to several years, to work on this installation. One of Chicago’s aims was to end the on-going cycle of omission in which women’s achievements are repeatedly written out of the historic record, a cycle of repetition that results in generation after generation of women struggling for insights and freedoms that are too often quickly forgotten or erased again.

Says the artist: “Elizabeth Sackler’s act of generosity and vision demonstrates that one individual can still make a difference, in this case, interceding in history to help ensure an ineradicable place for women.”

THE ARTIST
Judy Chicago, whose name has become synonymous with feminist art, grew up in Chicago and later took the name of her hometown as her surname. Educated in California, Chicago’s early work spanned several styles, including minimalism, abstraction and finally the evolution of a feminist art practice. In 1970 she pioneered the first Feminist Art program at California State University, Fresno. Prior to creating The Dinner Party Chicago had been showing for over a decade and struggling to create a feminist art practice. The Dinner Party, at once representative as well as conceptual art, utilizes a wide range of crafts generally regarded as women’s work. “Tell women’s history through woman’s crafts,” Chicago has said.

The Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation purchased The Dinner Party from the Judy Chicago Charitable Trust whose future mission, upon the death of the artist, will be to support artists, writers, and scholars whose works expand the vision embodied in The Dinner Party.

GENESIS
The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago is an icon of feminist art, which represents 1,038 women in history — 39 women are represented by place settings and another 999 names are inscribed in the Heritage Floor on which the table rests. This monumental work of art is comprised of a triangular table divided by three wings, each 48 feet long. Millennium runners, silk coverings inspired by altar cloths, fit over the apexes of the table. They are embroidered in white thread on a white ground, each with a subtle letter "M," as it is the 13th letter of the alphabet, signifying the break in each group of place settings. Arranged chronologically along the wings are 13 place settings; each includes a unique runner and plate, as well as a chalice, napkin, and utensils. Wing One of the table begins in prehistory with the Primordial Goddess setting and continues chronologically with the development of Judaism, to early Greek societies, to the Roman Empire, marking the decline in women's power, signified by the Hypatia plate. Wing Two represents early Christianity through the Reformation, depicting women who signify early articulations of the fight for equal rights, from Marcella to Anna van Schurman. Wing Three begins with Anne Hutchinson and addresses the American Revolution, Suffragism, and the movement toward women's increased individual creative expression, symbolized at last by the Georgia O'Keeffe place setting.

RECLAMATION
The Dinner Party sought to write forgotten women back into history. Its principle aim was to reclaim women from history — or his-story, as it was often referred to in the 1970s — a narrative that for millennia had excluded and even at times removed women as historical subjects.

When Chicago began researching and compiling women's names for inclusion in The Dinner Party, she was, in many instances, starting from scratch. There were no archeologists working seriously on the history of goddess civilizations and imagery, or the all-female Amazonian societies that dated back to the third and second-millenia b.c.; there were no Egyptologists yet interested in the power of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut; there was certainly no real scholarly interest yet in the Baroque painter, Artemisia Gentileschi. Indeed, monographs on women artists were scant and works by women were very rarely on view in museums (if they owned works at all). Within this context, the archival research that went into unearthing these historical figures must be understood as groundbreaking.

The Dinner Party is, therefore, representative of a specific moment in American history when the longstanding lack of scholarship about women was finally being addressed by an early generation of feminist scholars intent on excavating women from the archives, and criticizing his-story for its masculinist biases. This "reclamation" of women's lost history became one of the most important feminist strategies of the 1970s, and one that resulted in new scholarship on mythological and historical female figures and societies whose names we might not otherwise know of today. For instance, in 1974 and 1975, respectively, archeologists Marija Gimbutas and Merlin Stone presented comprehensive surveys of goddess-worshipping and matriarchal civilizations dating back to the Neolithic period (6500–3500 b.c.). In 1976, art historians Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin organized the landmark exhibition Women Artists: 1550-1950, the very first museum exhibition in this country dedicated exclusively to women artists. It was also in the 1970s that general women's art survey books were written for the first time: Eleanor Tufts's Our Hidden Heritage: Five Centuries of Women Artists, 1974; Elsa Honig Fine's Women and Art: A History of Women Painters and Sculptors from the Renaissance to the 20th Century, 1978; Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, 1979; among others.

For the first time in U.S. history, scholarly attention was being sufficiently paid to the cultural contributions of women historically, and The Dinner Party was a monumental example of its manifestation in visual form. However, the reclamation of a lost history was not the only feminist art strategy employed in The Dinner Party. There were others that, in sum, account for its power and longevity as a feminist icon, including the monumental scale of the piece; the use of "women's work" or "craft"; and, lastly, the celebration of vaginal or "central core" imagery.

WOMEN'S WORK
There is a hierarchy in the arts: decorative art at the bottom, and the human form at the top. Because we are men.

— Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, 1918

Throughout the history of art, decoration and domestic handicrafts have been regarded as women's work, and as such, not considered "high" or fine art. Quilting, embroidery, needlework, china painting, and sewing — none of these have been deemed worthy artistic equivalents to the grand mediums of painting and sculpture. The age-old aesthetic hierarchy that privileges certain forms of art over others based on gender associations has historically devalued "women's work" specifically because it was associated with the domestic and the "feminine." That hierarchy was radically challenged in the 1960s by Pop and feminist artists, alike (e.g., Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can series). In the wake of the Women's Liberation Movement, feminist artists in particular sought to resurrect women's craft and decorative art as a viable artistic means to express female experience, thereby pointing to its political and subversive potential.

In the quest for a "female aesthetic" or artistic style specific to women, many 1970s feminist artists sought to elevate "women's craft" to the level of "high art," and away from its derogatory designation as "low art" or "kitsch." As Lucy Lippard explained in her 1973 essay, Household Images in Art, previously women artists had avoided "'Female techniques' like sewing, weaving, knitting, ceramics, even the use of pastel colors (pink!) and delicate lines — all natural elements of artmaking," for fear of being labeled "feminine artists." The Women's Movement changed that, she argued, and gave women the confidence to begin "shedding their shackles, proudly untying the apron strings — and, in some cases, keeping the apron on, flaunting it, turning it into art."6 For instance, Ringgold's handmade, narrative quilts celebrate an undervalued female creative production, just as her "Family of Woman" masks and figurines from 1970 — portraits from her childhood of Mama Jones, Andrew, Barbara, and Faith — included costumes sewn by the artist's mother, who was a professional seamstress. Likewise with Miriam Schapiro's femmages, which she describes as "activities as they were practiced by women using traditional women's techniques to achieve their art."7 Schapiro viewed her use of brightly colored, patterned fabric as a conscious feminist statement. As she wrote in 1977, "I wanted to validate the traditional activities of women, to connect myself to the unknown women artists who had made quilts, who had done the invisible 'women's work' of civilization. I wanted to acknowledge them, to honor them."8 Schapiro's femmage, like Ringgold's narrative quilts, opened the path for the re-evaluation of anonymous art done by women.

Womanhouse, 1971-72, the large-scale cooperative project executed as part of the Feminist Art Program at CalArts under the direction of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, is another such example of feminist artists reclaiming the domestic and "women's work." It sought to challenge the traditional roles historically assigned to women in middle-class American society by exploring the subject of women's labor directly. It was within this inherently domestic environment, or "woman-house," that 21 women artists were granted space and a voice to present and perform work about stereotypically "feminine" tasks, including scrubbing floors, ironing sheets, cooking, sewing, crocheting, and knitting; cycles, such as menstruation; and forms, such as eggs, breasts, lipstick, and so forth. This landmark exhibition, through its reclamation and use of the domestic-private sphere, takes traditional female experiences as a subject with political and subversive implications.

The Dinner Party should be understood within this context. It is a multi-media work that consists of ceramics, china painting, sewing, needlework, embroidery, and other mediums traditionally associated with "women's work," and, as such, not generally considered "high art" by the art world. In an effort to celebrate undervalued female creative production, Chicago consciously sought to reclaim and commemorate those mediums traditionally considered "craft," as fine art ones equivalent to painting and sculpture. By creating a monumental work of art dedicated to anonymous art by women historically, Chicago thumbed her nose at those who dared to question its artistic value—or the labor involved in its production.

Around the same time that feminist artists were beginning to study mediums and materials associated with "women's work" — china painting, quilts, sewing, embroidery—they were also searching for a clearly readable means of expressing female subjectivity in abstract forms, which often resembled eggs, spheres, caves, or other round forms. This vaginal or "central core" imagery, as it came to be called, was another important development in 1970s feminist art, one that is integral to understanding The Dinner Party.

CENTRAL CORE IMAGERY
[T]o be a woman is to be an object of contempt, and the vagina, stamp of femaleness, is devalued. The woman artist, seeing herself as loathed, takes that very mark of her otherness and by asserting it as the hallmark of her iconography, establishes a vehicle by which to state the truth and beauty of her identity.

— Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, 1972

Another feminist strategy encountered in The Dinner Party is the celebration of vaginal iconography, which is, of course, the most controversial of its components. Chicago specifically chose to use vaginal or "central core" imagery for each of the plates in order to demonstrate that the one thing that united these forgotten historical subjects at the table was that they all had the same genitalia. Her aim was to reclaim and celebrate that mark of women's "otherness," replacing connotations of inferiority with those of pride, and to create a "new visual language" with which to express women's experience.

Chicago began experimenting with "central core" imagery in the late 1960s, along with other artists, including Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneemann, and Miriam Schapiro. Each of these artists, in her own way, sought to give women's bodies back to them, to assert a positive female sexuality by claiming her sex. Wilke's miniature gum vagina sculptures that she stuck on her naked body; Schneemann's interior origami scroll pulled from within her vagina that she read out loud to an audience; and Schapiro's luscious red Big Ox with its central cavity void all speak to feminist artists' reclamation of their bodies. The integration and celebration of vaginal imagery at that time was therefore a political gesture, not an erotic one.

Chicago, too, insists that her vaginal imagery be read not literally, but metaphorically, as an active and powerful symbol of female identity. Long before she began work on The Dinner Party, Chicago had been attempting to anthropomorphize the vulvae form, transforming it into numerous motifs suggesting caves and flowers. She eventually fused those abstract "core" images with the butterfly, an ancient symbol of liberation and resurrection, producing "a metaphor for an assertive female identity."10 She had finally arrived at her signature "central core" form: an active vaginal form, or her equivalent to the flying phallus from Greek art. The imagery of The Dinner Party plates incorporates this butterfly-vulvae motif. Each plate fuses an abstract portrait with an (active) butterfly form. As the visitor circumnavigates the table, the butterfly form surges up dimensionally, symbolizing women's increased strides toward liberation from prehistory to the modern era.

TOUR AND HOME
The Dinner Party first opened to the public at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on March 14, 1979. Five thousand people attended the opening, and during its three months on view, approximately one hundred thousand people came to see it.

After its premiere, The Dinner Party went on a nine-year international tour sparked by grass-roots efforts to find exhibition venues for the piece. The tour began in North America at the University of Houston at Clear Lake, Texas, and continued to venues in Boston, Brooklyn, Cleveland, Chicago, Atlanta, and across Canada. The tour continued through Europe at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Scotland; The Warehouse, London; and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany; ending at the Royal Exhibition and Conference Center in Melbourne, Australia, in 1988. The exhibitions were hugely popular, drawing large crowds at every venue—for the European tour alone the total viewing audience was over a million people.

During its worldwide tour, The Dinner Party received an enormous amount of press, both positive and negative. Chicago's desire to create a new visual language with which to express women's experience and to promote social change by creating respect for women's history and productions was not well received by the art world at large. Many described the work as "bad art" or "kitsch" without, of course, recognizing Chicago's deliberate reclamation of "women's work" as a feminist strategy. Some critics praised the work's socio-political content; others attacked the "central core" images as literal vaginas rather than metaphoric celebrations of female power.

Several reasons can be deduced from the negative reactions. The most obvious one was the fear of feminism itself. The Women's Liberation Movement had been, and continued to be, deeply threatening to both women and men. A feminist work of art on this monumental scale with challenging subject matter was bound to provoke controversy.

When the work returned to the U.S. in 1988, it was stored at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., which lacked large enough exhibition space to present it. Plans began to locate a permanent home for the piece, which was a long-time goal for Chicago. To her delight, in 1990, the Trustees of the University of the District of Columbia voted to accept and purchase The Dinner Party for their collection, which was to be housed in the Carnegie Library. Because Congress controls this University's budget, however, congresspersons who deemed the piece "pornographic" and "offensive" debated the purchase in televised congressional proceedings and a controversy ensued questioning the "value system" the artwork demonstrated. Ultimately, the purchase was denied.

The Dinner Party returned to storage until 1996, when it was exhibited at the Armand Hammer Museum at UCLA in the exhibition Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, curated by Amelia Jones. It once again drew large crowds, and virulent criticism. After the Sexual Politics exhibition, The Dinner Party returned to storage to face its ambiguous future.

In 2002, Dr. Elizabeth A. Sackler, philanthropist and board member of the Brooklyn Museum, began discussing the possibility of the Center after purchasing The Dinner Party in 2001. In 2002, the work was presented as a special exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum where 80,000 people came to see it.

In March 2007, The Dinner Party was permanently installed as the central work in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, around which changing exhibitions of feminist art are presented. Situated as such, the Center has thus preserved for posterity a visual symbol that the artist created specifically "to end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record."

The Dinner Party has found its home.

Maura Reilly is curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.

Leonardo da Vinci, 1495-1498, The Last Supper, Tempera on gesso, pitch, and mastic bum leonaro rocks, 181 × 346", Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan.