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1 INTRODUCTION Toward a Cultural History of The Dinner Party judy chicago’s installation The Dinner Party, the most monumental work of the 1970s feminist art movement, has been praised, damned, celebrated, and denounced since its debut in 1979. In fact, it delineated the need for women’s history, but strangely until now it has had no history of its own. This is particularly surprising because contemporary accounts are plentiful. Mademoiselle and Ms. discussed The Dinner Party, as did Newsweek, Mother Jones, the CBS Nightly News, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the New York Times, Art in America, and Artforum. People stood in line for hours to see it wherever it opened, while art critics pondered the reason for the public’s enthusiasm. Even the United States House of Representatives debated the significance of The Dinner Party. A visitor to the Brooklyn Museum today can see The Dinner Party in all its grandeur. Six large woven banners introduce the religious and feminist themes of what comes next. Three large tables (each forty-eight feet long) are arranged in a triangle; thirty-nine places are set for a grand dinner party for women, thirteen along each table, or wing. The first wing seats in chronological order notable women “From Prehistory to Rome”; the second, “From Christianity to the Reformation”; and the third, “From the American Revolution to the Women’s Revolution,” reaching to the midtwentieth century. Each place setting commemorates a woman of historical significance, and each features an oversized china plate carved and glazed in the shape of a vulva or butterfly, designed to represent the woman commemorated . Each plate, along with its chalice and utensils, sits on a richly designed 30-inch-wide and 51-inch-long runner embroidered in stitching appropriate to the guest’s historical era. Millennium runners, elaborate altar clothes that combine ecclesiastical and domestic white-work needle 2 introduction techniques, cover each of the three corners of the table and mark the transitions as sacred. The porcelain-tile floor under the tables radiates light, illuminating the names of 999 “women of merit” painted in glossy gold script. These names comprise streams of influence moving across time, connecting outstanding women to an overarching female network and genealogy. Between 1979 and 1989, Acknowledgement panels—listing the names of every person who worked on the piece over the five years of its production —traveled with it but are no longer on permanent display. The exhibit as a whole creates the feeling of being in a religious sanctuary where specialized lighting illuminates a series of secular altars. Viewers move around the installation, looking at the details in front of them and across the large triangle at the backs of runners that they can see only from afar. At the end of the exhibit, they can read Heritage Panels that detail the histories of every woman named at The Dinner Party. Today’s visitors to the Brooklyn Museum can hear Judy Chicago’s tour of The Dinner Party, originally recorded in 1980, on the museum’s cell-phone gallery guide. The Dinner Party emerged from unique feminist production conditions and circulated in unique market conditions under which its version of feminism could be sold to a mass audience. It completed its journey to “the museum” and achieved its status as canonical art under unconventional circumstances, to say the least. With origins in the West Coast feminist art movement of the early 1970s, The Dinner Party embodied a kind of art that few Americans outside of activist or bohemian circles had seen before. It brought to the mainstream a feminist representation of women as constituting a “sex class” and as a group sharing not only female body parts. but also a history of oppression and a culture of resilience over time and place. Furthermore, Judy Chicago challenged the idea of art as the product of a single auteur. While The Dinner Party was a frank monument to Chicago’s aesthetic and political views, media coverage—including from feminists and antifeminists, supporters and critics—coupled the feminist messages of the art with the feminist story of the making of The Dinner Party. Accounts of the art and the unique production of The Dinner Party circulated together, blurring the line between the art and the practice of Chicago’s style of feminism for those who read about or viewed the installation. The studio’s publicity campaign, designed by Diane Gelon, frequently referred to the impressive number of four hundred: four hundred women and men...

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