Thursday, December 4, 2008

Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party at The Brooklyn Museum

About thirteen years ago I was working on my senior thesis or something and spent a lot of time thinking about feminist visual art. Didn't really understand anything. Just spent a lot of time thinking about it. One piece that I read about but didn't really get was The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago. I finally had the chance to see The Dinner Party during my trip to The Brooklyn Museum to see Gilbert & George. In fact, on my way out of Gilbert & George I saw a sign that said something about Judy Chicago and The Dinner Party with an arrow pointing down a hallway and I thought, "Not THAT Judy Chicago. Not THAT Dinner Party." And I just had to follow the arrow.

The Brooklyn Museum's website has a VERY thorough section on The Dinner Party including a virtual tour of each place setting with quite possibly more information than you would EVER want to know about each and every one. Also, perhaps more directly relevant to our endeavor, it includes readable reproductions of the Heritage Panels segment of the The Dinner Party, some of which describe female artists from a number of historical periods.

I suspect we'll get to feminist art eventually in Stokstad's Art History. And maybe we can take some time then to try to wrap our collective brains around The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago.

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