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Home The Dinner Party, Wing Three, Virginia Woolf and Georgia O'Keeffe place-settings, detail.

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The Dinner Party, Wing Three, Virginia Woolf and Georgia O'Keeffe place-settings, detail.

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Larger Image	Larger image may be viewed by UofL faculty, staff, and students only (log-in required using ULink username/password) at: http://echo.louisville.edu/login?url=http://vrc-web.louisville.edu/Jpegs/820/827-10.jpg
Title	The Dinner Party, Wing Three, Virginia Woolf and Georgia O'Keeffe place-settings, detail.
Creator	Chicago, Judy (American painter and sculptor, born 1939)
Date	1979
Cultural Context	American North American
Style/Period	Contemporary
Theme	Sculpture (visual work) Installations (visual works) Mixed media Political art Women Feminism Feminists Female Gender issues Sex role Sex discrimination Sex Sexuality Biology Reproductive biology Genitals (animal or human components) Organic Abstraction History (discipline) Histories Historicism Culture Cultural heritage Art history Parties Celebrating Celebrations Tables (support furniture) Dining tables Tablecloths Runners (furniture coverings) Placemats Place settings Dinner plates Plates (dishes) Dinnerware Cups Goblets Forks (flatware) Spoons Knives Napkins Fantasy Aesthetics Iconography Allusion Symbols Symbolism (artistic concept) Metaphor Imagery Inscriptions Ceramics (objects) Floor tile Tile Crafts (art genres) Needlework (visual works) Needlepoint (visual works) Sewing (visual works) Embroidery (visual works) Crochet (needlework) Knitting (needlework) Beadwork Patchwork Applique (visual works) Triangles (polygons) Triangular Polygons Polygonal Overhead views Detail views
Subject	Sculpture Mixed media Women Women's rights Feminism Feminists Sexism Stereotyping Discrimination Sex Genitals Body parts Human body Biology History Arts & crafts Dinner parties Celebrations Parties Guests Dining tables Tables Tablecloths Table settings & decorations Tableware Drinking vessels Forks Spoons Knives Allusions Symbols Butterflies Fantasy Aesthetics Names Inscriptions Needlework Embroidery Crocheting Handicraft Sewing Details
Description	"Each of the ceramic plates adorning the table in this installation was individualized. In this photograph, the Georgia O'Keeffe plate on the right owed something of its original design to her Black Iris paintings of the mid-1920s. The plate dedicated to the reclusive Calvinist poet Emily Dickinson appropriately had 'ruffles' of pale pink, whilst that dedicated to the Italian baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi was surrounded by billowing 'folds' evocative of the drapery in her paintings." (Caption, p.186); "Victor Burgin's male self-questioning paralleled the rise of radical feminism. As the 1970s progressed, women powerfully contested the cultural stereotypes attached to traditional childbearing or domestic roles. In many ways Burgin's work responded to that of Mary Kelly, an American artist based in Britain, whose work systematically used Conceptualist devices to probe the social foundations of gender conditioning. However, Kelly's work departed significantly from overtly separatist feminist practices. These, as exemplified by the Californian Judy Chicago, celebrated the rediscovery of an essential 'feminine' consciousness. To understand first what Chicago stood for it is worth examining The Dinner Party. […] This enormous installation, which drew record crowds when first exhibited at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art in 1979, consisted of a triangular table with places set with ceramic vulvas and embroidered 'runners' for 39 imaginary female guests. These, along with 999 additional female invitees, whose names were written on floor tiles as part of the installation, were mainly artists and writers from the past. The work had two central functions. It rehabilitated talents overlooked or disparaged in male-oriented constructions of history, tying in with a reorientation of art history in the 1970s associated with writers such as Linda Nochlin in America and Griselda Pollock in Britain. At the same time its emphasis on 'applied arts' productions drew attention to women's frequently anonymous cultural participation, questioning aesthetic hierarchies. […] Male critics responded rather predictably. Robert Hughes, for instance, described the work as 'mainly cliché … with colours worthy of a Taiwanese souvenir factory'. The point was that decorative excess, bordering on kitsch, was being deliberately flaunted in the face of a renunciative 'masculinist' modernism. 'Sisterhood' replaced the image of the alienated male outsider. Along with the artist Miriam Schapiro, Chicago set up a Feminist Art Program at the University of California in 1971, which led to 'Womanhouse', a collaborative project in which teachers and students occupied an abandoned house, creating environmental works exploring domestic creativity. […] However, it should be noted that, although The Dinner Party was realized with the aid of numerous helpers, Chicago retained sole authorship of it. She diligently displayed her co-workers' names, but kept certain hierarchies in place. […] A controversial aspect of the work was its vulvic iconography. This was part of a genre of 'central-core' imagery, promoted by critics such as Lucy Lippard, which aimed to dislodge the cultural primacy of the phallus, rehabilitating the sign of women's biological 'lack' (to invoke Freud's discredited terms) as the symbol of their creativity. The work possibly echoes Louise Bourgeois's cannibalistic installation Destruction of the Father […] which was shown in New York in 1974, the year The Dinner Party was begun. But there is a sense in which Chicago turns Bourgeois's symbolic consumption of the patriarch into celebratory female self-consumption, which clearly has erotic undercurrents. The nature of the work's address thus becomes ambiguous. Indeed, many women found it reductive, implicitly returning them to biology." (Excerpt, pp.183-184)
Material	Mixed media Ceramics (objects) Ceramic (material) Tile Floor tile Cloth Porcelain Paint Thread
Measurements	121.9 x 106.7 x 7.6 cm
Technique	Sculpting Sewing (process) Needlepoint (needleworking) Needleworking (process) Embroidering Crocheting Knitting (process) Beading (process) Stitching Patchwork Appliqué (technique) Piecing Ceramic process Painting (image-making)
Inscription	The two runners shown here are embroidered with the following names: Virginia Woolf; Georgia O'Keeffe; Other names are shown written on the floor tiles.
Work Type	Sculpture Installations (visual works) Mixed media
Source	Hopkins, David. After Modern Art: 1945-2000. Oxford History of Art. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2000. (p.186, fig.94)
Rights	Photo © Donald Woodman, © Judy Chicago Collection.
Digital Publisher	University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center
Format	image/jpeg
Digital File Name	VRC 827-10.jpg
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The Dinner Party, Wing Three, Virginia Woolf and Georgia O'Keeffe place-settings, detail.

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