Invitation to a Dinner Party

Do you remember theThe Dinner Party?

I remember how excited women were- myself included – when it was unveiled. My commitment to feminist history was just beginning.

The project evolved from years of research into women from history and women who had made history. Five years in the making (1974-1979), Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party is a testament to feminist vision and artistic collaboration. It stands on a floor of luminescent triangular tiles covered in more gold, with 998 names of heroic women written in curling letters.

The Dinner Party measures 48 feet on each side, a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history.

The settings consist of embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils, and china-painted porcelain plates with raised central motifs that are based on vulvar and butterfly forms and rendered appropriate to the individual women being honored. The names of another 998 women are inscribed in gold on the white tile floor below the triangular table.*

When The Dinner Party opened on March 14, 1979, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, no one had ever seen anything like it. It was theatrical, audacious and definitively feminist. It is a work of symbolism and scholarship. It caused an immediate sensation. But that was only the beginning of its tumultuous life.

Chicago vividly remembers its difficult birth — the years of painstaking labor, the doubt about whether it would ever be finished, then the eventual triumph of its debut. Chicago’s intention had been to rededicate the history of Western civilization to the women who are often left out of it. She wanted to make a work so large that it could never be erased.

When The Dinner Party was first shown in San Francisco, over 100,000 people came to see it in the three months it was on display. Chicago was courted by national magazines and interviewed on the radio. She received letters from women all over the country telling her how moved they were by the piece, how it had changed their lives. But then came backlash. Colleagues whispered that it was not a work of art but a piece of clumsy political rhetoric. It received criticism for its lack of diversity and inclusivity. Over the next two decades, it was largely ignored by American art institutions.

In a 1981 interview, Chicago said that the backlash of threats and hateful castigation in reaction to the work brought on the a period of suicidal feelings, characterizing herself as “like a wounded animal.” She sought refuge from public attention by moving to a small rural community, in New Mexico.

In 2002, The Dinner Party was acquired and again shown by the Brooklyn Museum.  How different the fate of The Dinner Party if it had been shown for the first time now! It would have been embraced by artists and thinkers. No critic would have dared to dismiss it, though the small number of women of color included in the work might have prompted heated discussion. 

The 39 women at the table:

JUDY CHICAGO WAS born Judy Sylvia Cohen to a progressive Jewish family in Chicago in 1939. Her mother was a former dancer and medical secretary, and her father was a labor organizer who adored his daughter and encouraged her curiosity. The house was often full of friends debating books and Marxism, and Judy was invited to participate. Throughout her childhood, she spent Saturdays at the Art Institute of Chicago, taking figure drawing and painting classes, and then wandering through the museum alone, studying Seurat, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec. When Chicago was 13, her father died suddenly — the great loss of her life. At 23, she was a widow: Her first husband was killed in a car accident. For the past few decades, Chicago and photographer Donald Woodman, who were married in 1985 after knowing one another for only three months, have lived and worked in a large brick building in Belen, N. M., 35 miles south of Albuquerque. The Belen Hotel, as they call their home, a 1907 boardinghouse for railroad workers that Woodman renovated himself.

To be included in the 998 tiles:
She had provided a role model for a more egalitarian future.

She had made a worthwhile contribution to society

She had tried to improve the lot of other women

Her life and work had illuminated significant aspects of women’s history.

https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/dinner_party/

https://louisville.edu/art/facilities-resources/international-honor-quilt

https://www.newyorktimes.com/2018/02/07/t-magazine/judy-chicago-dinner-party