The Dinner Party

The Dinner Party is an installation artwork by American feminist artist Judy Chicago. There are 39 elaborate place settings on a triangular table for 39 mythical and historical famous women. Kali, Judith, Sacajawea, Virginia Woolf, Susan B. Anthony, and Georgia O'Keeffe are among the symbolic guests.

Each place setting includes a hand-painted china plate, ceramic cutlery and chalice, and a napkin with an embroidered gold edge. Each plate, except the ones corresponding to Sojourner Truth and Ethel Smyth, depicts a brightly colored, elaborately styled vulvar form. The settings rest on intricately embroidered runners, executed in a variety of needlework styles and techniques. The table stands on The Heritage Floor, made up of more than 2,000 white luster-glazed triangular tiles, each inscribed in gold scripts with the name of one of 998 women and one man who have made a mark on history. (The man, Kresilas, was included by mistake, as he was thought to have been a woman called Cresilla.)

The Dinner Party was produced from 1974 to 1979 as a collaboration and first exhibited in 1979. Despite art world resistance, it toured to 16 venues in six countries on three continents to a viewing audience of 15 million. It was retired to storage from 1988 until 1996, as it was beginning to suffer from constant traveling. In 2007, it became a permanent exhibit in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

About the work

thumb|The Dinner Party at the [[Brooklyn Museum|alt=|left]]

The Dinner Party was created by artist Judy Chicago, with the assistance of numerous volunteers, with the goal to "end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record."

The table is triangular and measures 48 feet (14.63 m) on each side. There are 13 place settings on each of the table's sides, making 39 in all. Wing I honors women from Prehistory to the Roman Empire, Wing II honors women from the beginnings of Christianity to the Reformation and Wing III from the American Revolution to feminism.

The white floor of triangular porcelain tiles, called the Heritage Floor, is inscribed with the names of a further 998 notable women (and one man, Kresilas, an ancient Greek sculptor, mistakenly included as he was thought to have been a woman called Cresilla), each associated with one of the place settings.

In 2018, Chicago created a limited edition set of functional plates based on the Dinner Party designs. The designs that were reproduced were Elizabeth I, Primordial Goddess, Amazon, and Sappho.

Design details

The Dinner Party took six years and $250,000 to complete, not including volunteer labor. It began modestly as Twenty-Five Women Who Were Eaten Alive, a way in which Chicago could use her "butterfly-vagina" imagery and interest in china painting in a high-art setting. The work also uses supplementary written information such as banners, timelines, and a three-book exhibition publication to provide background information on each woman and the process of making the work.

Response

In a 1981 interview, Chicago said that the backlash of threats and hateful castigation in reaction to the work brought on the only period of suicide risk she had ever experienced in her life, characterizing herself as "like a wounded animal". She said that she sought refuge from public attention by moving to a small rural community and that friends and acquaintances took on administrative support roles for her, such as opening her mail, while she threw herself into working on Embroidering Our Heritage, the 1980 book documenting the project.

Just as adamant, however, were the immediate criticisms of the work. Hilton Kramer, for example, argued, "The Dinner Party reiterates its theme with an insistence and vulgarity more appropriate, perhaps, to an advertising campaign than to a work of art". He called the work not only a kitsch object but also "crass and solemn and singleminded", "very bad art,... failed art,... art so mired in the pieties of a cause that it quite fails to acquire any independent artistic life of its own".

Mullarkey focused on several particular plates in her critique of the work, specifically Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Georgia O'Keeffe, using these women as examples of why Chicago's work was disrespectful to the women it depicts. She states that Dickinson's "multi-tiered pink lace crotch" was opposite the woman that it was meant to symbolize because of Dickinson's extreme privacy.

In response to The Dinner Party being a collaborative work, Amelia Jones makes note that "Chicago never made exorbitant claims for the 'collaborative' or nonhierarchical nature of the project. She has insisted that it was never conceived or presented as a 'collaborative' project as this notion is generally understood ... The Dinner Party project, she insisted throughout, was cooperative, not collaborative, in the sense that it involved a clear hierarchy but cooperative effort to ensure its successful completion."

New York Times art reviewer Roberta Smith declares that all of the details are not equal. She believes that "the runners tend to be livelier and more varied than the plates. In addition, the runners grow strong as the work progresses, while the plates become weaker, more monotonous and more overdone, which means the middle two-thirds of the piece is more successful." With the runners becoming more detailed as the work progresses, Smith notes that the backs of the runners are difficult to see and they "may be the best and boldest parts of all." Similarly, Smith stated that "its historical import and social significance may be greater than its aesthetic value".

Regarding the place settings, Janet Koplos believes that the plates are meant to serve as canvases, and the goblets offer vertical punctuation. She feels, however, that the "standardized flatware is historically incorrect early on and culturally skewed. The settings would be stronger as plates and runners alone."

Race and identity

In a 1984 article, Hortense J. Spillers critiqued Judy Chicago and The Dinner Party, asserting that, as a white woman, Chicago recreates the erasure of the black feminine sexual self. Spillers calls to her defense the place setting of Sojourner Truth, the only black woman. After thorough review, it can be seen that all of the place settings depict uniquely designed vaginas, except for Sojourner Truth. The place setting of Sojourner Truth is depicted by three faces, rather than a vagina. Spillers writes, "The excision of the female genitalia here is a symbolic castration. By effacing the genitals, Chicago not only abrogates the disturbing sexuality of her subject, but also hopes to suggest that her sexual being did not exist to be denied in the first place..." Much like Spillers's critique, Alice Walker published her critical essay in Ms. magazine noting "Chicago's ignorance of women of color in history (specifically black women painters), focusing in particular on The Dinner Partys representation of black female subjectivity in Sojourner Truth's plate. Walker states, "It occurred to me that perhaps white women feminists, no less than white women generally, can not imagine black women have vaginas. Or if they can, where imagination leads them is too far to go."

Esther Allen further criticizes Chicago in her article "Returning the Gaze, with a Vengeance". Allen claims that The Dinner Party excludes women from Spain, Portugal, or any of these empires' former colonies. This means that several very prominent women of Western history were excluded, such as Frida Kahlo, Teresa of Ávila, Gabriela Mistral, and more. Chicago herself responded to these criticisms, claiming that all of these women are included on the "Heritage Floor" and that focusing solely on who is at the table is "to over-simplify the art and ignore the criteria my studio team and I established and the limits we were working under". Further, Chicago states that, in the mid-1970s, there was little or no knowledge about any of these women.

Larger retrospective response

Critics such as Mullarkey have returned to The Dinner Party in later years and stated that their opinions have not changed. Many later responses to the work, however, have been more moderate or accepting, even if only by giving the work value based on its continued importance.

Amelia Jones, for example, places the work in the context of both art history and the evolution of feminist ideas to explain critical responses of the work. She discusses Hilton Kramer's objection to the piece as an extension of Modernist ideas about art, stating, "the piece blatantly subverts modernist value systems, which privilege the 'pure' aesthetic object over the debased sentimentality of the domestic and popular arts" .

Controversy at the University of the District of Columbia

In 1990, The Dinner Party was considered for permanent housing at the University of the District of Columbia. It was part of a plan to bring in revenue for the school, as it had proved to be very successful.

Companion piece

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.

References

Bibliography

Chicago, Judy. The Dinner Party: From Creation to Preservation. London: Merrell (2007). .

External links

The Dinner Party exhibition website from the Brooklyn Museum, including a searchable database of all the women represented.
The Dinner Party from Chicago's non-profit organization, Through the Flower.

Videos and documentary films

28 March 2007
Video tour of the work and part of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art by James Kalm . 28 March 2007. Accessed September 2009.
41-minute video where Judy Chicago personally takes viewers on a tour of The Dinner Party, with explanations of how the work was created, as well as special focus on certain place settings. 3 October 2012. Accessed 21 July 2013.
Right Out of History: Judy Chicago, Phoenix Learning Group (2008) (DVD)