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The Dinner Party: Restoring Women to History

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The Dinner Party: Restoring Women to History

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Overview

When Judy Chicago's multimedia exhibit The Dinner Party opened in the late 1970s, it was almost as shocking to the art world and to society at large at the first exhibit of Impressionists nearly a century before. And like that art, it stretched the limits of artistic vision and expression, soon becoming a landmark in art history.

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ISBN-13:	9781580933971
Publisher:	The Monacelli Press
Publication date:	07/08/2014
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 1.50(h) x 9.50(d)

About the Author

A preeminent artist, author, feminist, and educator, Judy Chicago's work and life have been devoted to expanding women's presence in the arts and in art history. Her art is frequently exhibited in the United States and internationally. The Dinner Party is her best-known work.

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Editorial Reviews

One of the earliest organizers of the 1970s women's movement in art, Chicago has remained a high-profile, controversial multimedia feminist artist. These two works can be read as sequels/updates to Chicago's three previous books: her outspoken Through the Flower (LJ 3/15/75), The Dinner Party (LJ 6/1/79), and Embroidering Our Heritage (LJ 12/80). Chicago established her international reputation early on with the first book, an indiscreet, youthful autobiography that decried, sometimes in street language, her personal pain as a woman artist within a patriarchal society. In her updated Beyond the Flowers, as in the Dinner Party, expanded for a reopening debut in Los Angeles, she laments the vicissitudes of her personal life and career and the vast amount of money still needed to find a permanent home for her famous/infamous collaborative installation. "The Dinner Party" now appears in standard Western art survey texts. It records 1,038 mythical and historical women of Western civilization, especially honoring 39 of these with place settings on a triangular banquet table 48' per side. Controversy surrounded the imagery of the 39 plates, multicolor, explicit depictions of vaginas as harshly aggressive genitalia that are often criticized as inappropriate stand-ins for famous women. In The Dinner Party, a judiciously edited commemoration of a recent showing of the work, Chicago responds, "What is wrong with that?" Both books are essential for social, political, and feminist art collections.Mary Hamel-Schwulst, Towson State Univ., Md.

Library Journal

★ 03/24/2014
When noted feminist artist Chicago was an undergrad, one of her history professors declared: “Women’s contributions to European intellectual history? They made none.” As she explains in the introduction to the first book to represent her groundbreaking mixed-media installation “The Dinner Party” (1974-79), this comment inspired her to create an alternative history of women’s cultural, political, and scholarly achievements. Consisting of 39 handmade place settings, celebrating notable women from the primordial goddess to Georgia O’Keefe, the installation has been permanent housed in the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art since 2007. Chicago describes the work’s genesis, evolution, its collective nature, problematic exhibition history, and public impact. Organized to mirror the exhibition, each section is divided into four chronological wings, rather than chapters, and includes a short description of the woman represented and a photograph of her plate and place setting. Surrounding the photographs are summaries of the other women whose 999 names are inscribed on the ceramic tile floor (“Heritage Floor”) on which the triangular table rests. Many of the plates photograph well, particularly those for Sappho and Virginia Woolf, and handmade runners are spectacular. In this volume, published to coincide with her 75th birthday and including a foreword by Brooklyn Museum director Arnold L. Lehman, and essays by Frances Borzello and Jane F. Gerhard, Chicago offers a vibrant visual and textual encyclopedia of female achievement. 100 color illus. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Organized to mirror the exhibition, each section is divided into four chronological wings, rather than chapters, and includes a short description of the woman represented and a photograph of her plate and place setting. Surrounding the photographs are summaries of the other women whose 999 names are inscribed on the ceramic tile floor (“Heritage Floor”) on which the triangular table rests. Many of the plates photograph well, particularly those for Sappho and Virginia Woolf, and handmade runners are spectacular. In this volume, published to coincide with her 75th birthday, Judy Chicago offers a vibrant visual and textual encyclopedia of female achievement.” - Publishers Weekly
“Thirty-five years after the debut exhibition of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, this book highlights this monumental installation piece of feminist art. It takes a fresh look at the piece, which sought to right the omission of women artists from art history books. The artwork is described in detail in three chronological sections, beginning with prehistory and ending with the woman’s revolution of the 1970s. All of the women - from the central piece to the names listed on the floor tiles - are included for their contributions. Essays cover the biography of Judy Chicago, describe how the work arrived at the museum, and offer an art historian’s perspective on its place in history and the feminist movement. The piece, controversial for its depiction of a vulva form in each plate, was shown 16 times in six countries, with over a million viewers. This book is a fitting tribute.” - Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries
“Serves as a kind of user’s manual to that iconic work of feminist art that once inspired an 87-minute debate in the U.S. House of Representatives over whether it was art or pornography. In this new book, Chicago explains in exquisite detail the art work surrounding the 1,038 women’s names memorialized by The Dinner Party and how the art expresses the fight for women’s rights from antiquity to today.” - Big Think

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