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180 CHAPTER SIX The Tour That Very Nearly Wasn’t The Dinner Party’s Alternative Showings, 1980–1983 despite the crowds and the enthusiasm on display in San Francisco, the formal gatekeepers of the institutional art world did not embrace The Dinner Party either before or after its brilliant opening in 1979. That spring, the next two museums scheduled to show The Dinner Party reneged on their agreements, leaving Chicago and Gelon scrambling to find alternative spaces to show it. News of the cancellations was a terrible blow.1 For Chicago, the popularity of The Dinner Party was a powerful testimony to audiences’ connection to the piece and justification enough for museums to show it. Yet museum curators, boards of directors, and art critics judged art on terms driven by aesthetics, cost, space, and schedules, not popularity . That The Dinner Party proved to be popular among audiences did not, on its face, guarantee that a serious discussion would ensue about whether to display it. The story of the tour that very nearly wasn’t broached critical questions about the connection between art and audiences first raised by the feminist art movement in the early 1970s and increasingly relevant in the 1980s and 1990s as government funding for the arts came under congressional fire. Ironically, the very elements that made museums uneasy about showing The Dinner Party—its size, its content, and its controversies —set the stage for it to become an infamous icon of the feminist art movement. It was with an element of comeuppance, then, that The Dinner Party’s status as feminist blockbuster came about as a direct consequence of the collapse of the museum tour. Revenge, as is said, is a dish best served cold. Like the piece’s unique production, its us tour—consisting of two museums and five community shows between 1979 and 1982—became noteworthy precisely for its unconventionality and the indefatigability of its success. As the tour that very nearly wasn’t 181 community groups stepped forward to build a us tour, public enthusiasm for The Dinner Party was as much on display as the art and vividly demonstrated the piece’s unusual ability to cross the heavily patrolled boundary between museums and community spaces, between fine art and “craft,” and between elite and popular reception. Community showings of The Dinner Party required tremendous effort and years of organization to pull off. Organizers had to reproduce, on their own, the material support routinely offered by a museum: create a climatecontrolled , well-lit gallery with guards and docents, paid support staff, and paid installation staff; and come up with funds for publicity and insurance. Without these things, groups of interested audiences worked from the ground up to build alternative museum spaces to show the art they wanted to see, extending the grassroots feminist art movement geographically beyond the hubs of la and New York and chronologically into the 1980s. Regular local newspaper coverage generated ongoing buzz around The Dinner Party as a culturally significant event and brought audiences from near and far to see it. From audience responses, it appeared that no one apart from museum curators and art critics disputed that the art of The Dinner Party was visually arresting. Each community show drew unprecedented numbers of viewers and each made a profit that the community—not the artist—kept and distributed. The unexpected success of its non-museum tour spoke unmistakably of the appeal of The Dinner Party and its feminist message to audiences. One explanation for The Dinner Party’s success despite its across-the-board rejection by elite cultural institutions can be attributed to its translation of feminism—specifically, women’s right to a heroic past—into an engaging message that spoke to a range of women not typically found under the banner of feminism. It did so as a form of symbolic feminism designed to inspire viewers, not to map out a course of action. The meanings of the piece—which included women’s underappreciated contributions to Western civilization, the practice of women’s culture, patriarchy as a force in women’shistory,thesharedcommonalitiesamongwomen—resonatedwith many kinds of people. Seeing women from across history and culture as members of a single sex class, even if only for the time it took to walk around the exhibit, moved many who might have come just to see what all the fuss was about but who left feeling inspired. In this way, community shows suggest a way to chart the cultural impact of...

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