Introduction

The Dinner Party is an installation artwork by feminist artist Judy Chicago depicting place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women. It was produced from 1974 to 1979 as a collaboration and was first exhibited in 1979. Since 2007 it has been on permanent exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, New York City United States of America.

In preparation for The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago studied china-painting for two years (1972 - 1974) because she had decided that her abstract portraits of women required a different technique than the sprayed acrylic she had been using. Having discovered the hobbyist tradition of painting on porcelain, she set out to master the technique and apply it to her own imagery, thereby elevating to a fine-art context what had become a craft that was generally disdained by the art community.

In the process of learning the range of techniques associated with china-painting, Judy Chicago created a number of unique works painted and fired onto porcelain in a slow and painstaking process that would prepare her for painting The Dinner Party plates.

Six woven banners (5' 6" x 3' 6" each) hang in procession, welcoming visitors to The Dinner Party. Designed by Chicago, the tapestries repeat the red, black, and gold tones associated with The Dinner Party and incorporate motifs found throughout the piece, such as triangular, floral, and abstracted butterfly forms.

After painting the images on paper and selecting the thread colors, Chicago transferred her designs to graph paper, creating cartoons (patterns weavers use), which were then attached to the back of the warped looms.

The principal component of The Dinner Party is a massive ceremonial banquet arranged in the shape of an open triangle—a symbol of equality—measuring forty-eight feet on each side with a total of thirty-nine place settings.

The "guests of honor" commemorated on the table are designated by means of intricately embroidered runners, each executed in a historically specific manner. Upon these are placed, for each setting, a gold ceramic chalice and utensils, a napkin with an embroidered edge, and a fourteen-inch china-painted plate with a central motif based on butterfly and vulvar forms. Each place setting is rendered in a style appropriate to the individual woman being honored.

The Dinner Party rests upon the Heritage Floor, which is an equilateral triangle forty-eight feet on each side. This monumental floor is comprised of 2,300 hand-cast porcelain tiles and provides both a structural and metaphorical support for The Dinner Party table.

Inscribed in gold luster are the names of 999 mythical and historical women of achievement, who were selected to contextualize the 39 women represented in the place settings and to convey "how many women had struggled into prominence or been able to make their ideas known—sometimes in the face of overwhelming obstacles—only (like the women on the table) to have their hard-earned a chievements marginalized or erased"

The seven Heritage Panels are large-scale hand-colored photo-and-text collages (ranging in size from 57 1/2 x 70 3/4 to 57 1/2 x 107") that portray the lives of the mythical and historical women whose names are inscribed in the Heritage Floor of The Dinner Party. Judy Chicago, with the help of a team of researchers, selected 999 women from prehistory to the 20th century, whose example impacted women's history and the improvement of women's conditions

Like the Heritage Floor, the names listed on the Heritage Panels are organized beneath their corresponding place setting. The 999 names are accompanied by biographical information, photographs of related art and artifacts, and images of many of the women. To contextualize the importance of their legacies, Chicago also included brief passages describing the circumstances against which women had to struggle for equity throughout history.

The team

pps created by Ariatta

Images from virtual Brooklyn Museum