☻ Triangular shape is a symbol for women (use of goddess imagery) and during the French Revolution was an emblem of equality.

☻ Pays special homage to 39 historic and legendary women – from a pre-historic goddess to Georgia O’Keefe in a linear history.

☻ Each individual place setting features an embroidered runner, designed in a style historically appropriate to the women it represents and a large ceramic plate.

☻ Stitchery, needlepoint, china painting all traditional women’s art forms (‘craft’). Chicago wished to raise to the status of china painting and needlepoint by combining it with painting and sculpture.

☻ Most plates feature shapes based on female genitalia (in butterfly forms) because “that is all the women at the table had in common… They were from different periods, classes, ethnicities, geographies, experiences, but what kept them within the same confined historical space was the fact that they were women”.

Reactions:

☻ Many women viewing it experienced an almost religious exaltation and critic Lucy Lippard called it “awesome…one of the most ambitious works of art made in the post-war period that succeeds as few others have”.

☻ On the other hand, Hilton Kramer of the NY Times called it “An outrageous libel on the female imagination”.

The Dinner Party 1974-79

http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/srs8/engl_252/pictures/judy-chicago-woolf.html