Who remembersThe Dinner Party?
I remember how excited women were–myself included– when it emerged.
Five years in the making (1974-1979), Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party is a testament to the power of feminist vision and artistic collaboration, incorporating traditional women’s crafts such as embroidery, needlepoint, and ceramics. The whole assemblage stands on a floor of luminescent triangular tiles covered in more gold — 999 names of other heroic women written in curling letters.
The Dinner Party measures 48 feet on each side and comprises 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 in styles appropriate to the individual women being honored. The names of another 999 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: a work of stark symbolism and detailed scholarship, inviting both awe and identification. 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, and 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 feted in 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. The planned tour of the show was canceled, with minimal explanation. Over the next two decades, it was largely ignored by American art institutions.
In 2002, it was acquired and again shown at the Brooklyn Museum. The Times art critic Roberta Smith summarized its reception. “Call it what you will: kitsch, pornography, artifact, feminist propaganda or a major work of 20th-century art, it doesn’t make much difference. ‘The Dinner Party’ . . . is important.”
How different the fate of “The Dinner Party” if it had been shown for the first time in 2018! Perhaps an opening with Solange and Patti Smith and Oprah and maybe even Hillary Clinton in attendance, the scores of Instagram posts — loving shots of the plates accompanied by hashtags: #JudyChicago, #Vaginachina, #Herstory. 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 International Honor Quilt (also known as the International Quilting Bee) is a collective feminist art project initiated in 1980 by Judy Chicago as a companion piece to The Dinner Party. Through the Flower, Chicago’s not-for-profit organization, gifted the collection the Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville, in 2013 to be available for research and to exhibit.
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 precocity. 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 Jerry Gerowitz, a rebellious free spirit 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.
I hope someday to see The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum.
https://www.newyorktimes.com/2018/02/07/t-magazine/judy-chicago-dinner-party.htlm
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/dinner_party/
https://louisville.edu/art/facilities-resources/international-honor-quilt
