She was a leader in feminist art circles, but she’d never mounted anything quite like this before. The installation was the size of a room, comprising three tables arranged in a triangle and elaborately staged for a meal with 39 places; each was set for a historic woman, such as Hypatia and Emily Dickinson, and included an embroidered banner with their name on it as well as a handpainted ceramic plate. On nearly every plate was an abstracted, aestheticized vulva. On white tiles under the tables were the names of 999 more women, written in gold script.
It took Judy Chicago and about 400 helpers five years to create “The Dinner Party.” It was momentous, an attempt to remake both history and contemporary art in a feminist image, and in the three months after it debuted at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979, around 100,000 people came to see it. Many women were deeply moved, leaving appreciative comments in the guest book and sending Chicago fan mail. But not all women: Some noticed that just two of the places were set for people who weren’t white — Sacagawea and Sojourner Truth, who’s the only figure depicted by a set of faces rather than a vulva. Writing in Ms. in 1979, Alice Walker said that although she “loved Chicago’s art and audacity,” she suspected that “perhaps white women feminists, no less than white women generally, cannot imagine black women have vaginas. Or if they can, where imagination leads them is too far to go.”
Many critics called it kitsch. Men were especially vicious. Robert Hughes of Time wrote that it was “simple, didactic, portentous, gaudily evangelical and wholly free of wit or irony”; to Hilton Kramer of the New York Times, it was “failed art.” Most other U.S. museums that had been scheduled to show the work after SFMOMA canceled their plans. Although Chicago and her friends and supporters managed to find alternate venues, including abroad, the work would end up in storage for decades — until 2007, when it went on permanent view at the Brooklyn Museum.
“The Dinner Party” has cast a long shadow over Chicago’s life and career. Although the initial backlash caused her to fall into a deep depression, the artist, now 84, never stopped working, and museums are finally looking at the full arc of her career. “Herstory,” at the New Museum, is the first exhibition to do so in New York. It’s a big show, full of big art and big gestures: early, hefty experiments in minimalist painting and sculpture; canvases filled with floral, vulvar imagery; trippy tapestries; and more. Chicago has worked mostly in series and projects, and even those comprising smaller pieces — like “The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction” (2012–18), which features glowing images of endangered animals and the artist’s musings on death, painted on black glass — are displayed in groupings. In a way, Chicago’s whole oeuvre feels like a riposte to a society that encourages men to think and work on an epic scale but tells women they must make themselves small. The show affirms how groundbreaking she has been — and illuminates how stale ideas from second-wave feminism have lingered, both in her work and in the mainstream.
Born Judith Cohen in 1939, Chicago came up in 1960s Los Angeles, studying art at UCLA. The scene was dominated by men, both in terms of who got to show their work and the kind of work that got shown: polished, sometimes ethereal abstraction that privileged form over content. Its mostly white-male makers, like Larry Bell and Robert Irwin, believed, wrongly, that the art they created was above the fray of subjectivity. In an effort to fit in, Chicago adopted more masculine attire and habits, including smoking cigars and attending motorcycle races; she went out drinking with the guys, but, according to the “Herstory” catalogue, “more often than not, she went home and cried” afterward because of how misogynistic they were. In the studio, she attempted to merge the biomorphic forms and soft colors that grew out of her lived experiences with the glossy, implacable surfaces and nonrepresentational forms of minimalism. These experiments were largely rejected by her professors and by dealers from the famous Ferus Gallery as too feminine. At the New Museum, where they form the entry point of the show, they’re some of the most exhilarating work.
In the first gallery, two installations line up painted beams of stainless steel in chromatic and physical ascension — geometric rainbows that seem to poke fun at the self-seriousness and machismo of her peers. They frame a set of three wall-mounted “Hoods” (1964–65/2011), eye-popping compositions of vulvar, phallic, and geometric shapes spray-painted on car hoods. (After finishing her master’s at UCLA, Chicago enrolled in auto-body school to learn spray-painting; she was the only woman among 250 men.) I found myself laughing appreciatively at the double entendre — the automotive hood and the clitoral one — and delighting in their symmetrical, Surreal imagery and clashing palettes, with strong doses of pink and red. The paintings, psychedelic Rorschach tests, seem to foreshadow the brashness of “The Dinner Party.”
As the ’60s gave way to the ’70s, Chicago began to embrace her feminist consciousness and adopted her new moniker — a way of “divest[ing] herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance,” as she announced in an ad in Artforum. She founded the first college-level feminist art program in the country and began making her “Atmospheres” works by releasing colored flares and smoke into natural landscapes, liberating color along with herself. She started to home in on abstracted representations of female genitalia as a symbol of empowerment. Chicago and her colleague Miriam Schapiro, who made feminist collages that she dubbed “femmages,” called this “central core imagery.”
I’ve long been hesitant about that imagery, wondering about the exclusions suggested by its literalness. It seems, like a pussy hat, to premise womanhood on organs alone. But the central core work in “Herstory” is more free-floating than that, and terrific: Paintings like Through the Flower and Heaven Is for White Men Only (both 1973) are luminous, transcendent, spiritual. The Rejection Drawings (1974) contain vulnerable, handwritten confessions. “In these images, I discarded my formalized structure for the first time and in so doing, broke through into a new form language,” Chicago writes in Rejection Fantasy Drawing, her text interspersed with renderings of layered vulvas that transform into caves and then butterflies. “But, in breaking through, I became frightened by the prospect of my new loneliness and the difficulty of going on from here.”
Things would not get easier as Chicago undertook “The Dinner Party” — which is represented only minimally at the New Museum, in the form of line drawings for the place settings and test plates; it did not leave the Brooklyn Museum. The installation deserves recognition for the scale of what it achieved: all the women it highlights, its huge network of collaboration, its formal invention. Chicago and her volunteers reclaimed, within the realm of art, crafts that had been denigrated as women’s work, such as porcelain painting, ceramics, and needlework. She pulled off a similar feat with the “Birth Project” (1980–85), a similarly collaborative, research-heavy effort to represent the experiences of birth and motherhood in needlework. The five stunning, monumental tapestries from the project that are included at the New Museum mark a turning point in Chicago’s career: Amid their swirling, cosmic landscapes, bodies reach out and writhe — a signal of her imminent shift from abstraction to figuration.
The projects that followed are not as successful. Chicago’s embrace of a more figurative, populist style also made her work more literal, weighing it down. Huge paintings from the “PowerPlay” series (1982–87) feature a white man peeing on the Earth and spraying blood from his hand pointed like a gun, a blunt caricature of toxic masculinity. In the “Holocaust Project” (1985–93), Chicago and her husband, Donald Woodman, present painted, pained figures alongside screenprinted reproductions of photographs from the Holocaust, but it’s not clear what deeper purpose all the anguished imagery is meant to serve. I found myself missing the playfulness of the earlier work. Although Chicago is a master at creating fascinating visual effects in whatever medium she adopts, a kind of simplistic thinking creeps up, one that reduces complex subjects to overdetermined morals and dichotomies. It bogs down the culmination of “Herstory”: a magenta-carpeted mini-exhibition on the museum’s fourth floor titled “The City of Ladies.”
Inspired by and named after a book by the French medieval writer Christine de Pizan, “The City of Ladies” is described as Chicago’s “personal museum,” with art and artifacts by almost 90 women, including a 12th-century manuscript by the visionary theologist Hildegard von Bingen and the bronze maquette for Augusta Savage’s 16-foot-tall harp sculpture Lift Every Voice and Sing, which was destroyed after being displayed at the 1939 World’s Fair. Hanging above is a series of banners that Chicago created at the behest of the fashion brand Christian Dior, as part of the set for a haute couture show in 2020. Titled “The Female Divine,” they pose a series of questions, starting with “What If Women Ruled the World?” and follow-ups like, “Would There Be Violence?” The banners are elegant. The queries border on inane. Representing a way of thinking that imagines women to be inherently, magically good, the project feels painfully outdated.
“The City of Ladies” recalls “The Dinner Party,” both in its acknowledgment that no artist works in a vacuum and in its reductiveness. The earlier work falls into the trap of the second wave in its emphasis on gender as the source of oppression for all women, with an unwitting focus on whiteness and middle-class experience. The people in “The City of Ladies” are more racially diverse — this time, Sojourner Truth is represented by one of her famous calling cards — and brief biographies are provided for each. Wrapped in the banners of “The Female Divine,” with Chicago’s goddess figures standing sentinel, they feel flattened nonetheless. These portraits and self-portraits, abstract paintings and craftwork, are slotted into a heavy-handed narrative in service of a feminism that still can’t seem to see past itself. Not all of women’s work is about womanhood. Chicago — who spent so much of her career pigeonholed — should know.
