Inside of a Dog, It's Too Dark to Read

In October 2002, a major exhibition surveying Chicago's career was presented at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The show was accompanied by a catalog edited by Dr. Elizabeth A. Sackler with essays by Lucy Lippard and Dr. Viki Thompson Wylder and an Introduction by Edward Lucie-Smith.

• Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist, 1975 (subsequently published in England, Germany, Japan, and Taiwan);


• The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage, 1979;


• Embroidering Our Heritage:The Dinner Party Needlework, 1980 (subsequently published in a combined edition in Germany);


• The Birth Project, 1985 (Anchor/Doubleday);


• Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light, 1993;


• The Dinner Party/Judy Chicago, 1996;


• Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist, 1996 (Viking Penguin).

In 1999, Chicago published a book coauthored with Edward Lucie-Smith, the well-known British art writer. Published in the U.S., Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany, Women and Art: Contested Territory examines images of women by both male and female artists throughout history. In the spring of 2000, Judy Chicago: An American Vision, a richly illustrated monograph about Chicago's career by Edward Lucie-Smith, was published. This book provided the first comprehensive assessment of Chicago's body of art.

In 1999, Chicago returned to teaching for the first time in twenty-five years, having accepted a succession of one-semester appointments at various institutions around the country-beginning with Indiana University, Bloomington, where she received a Presidential Appointment in Art and Gender Studies. In 2000, she was an Inter-Institutional Artist in Residence at Duke University and the University of North Caroline, Chapel Hill. In 2001, with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, she undertook a project with students at Western Kentucky University, which commemorated the thirty-year anniversary of Womanhouse. Working with students, faculty and local artists, Chicago and Woodman developed a project titled, At Home, re-examining the subject of "the house," this time from the perspective of residents of Kentucky who have a keen sense of place and home. In the fall of 2003, Chicago and Woodman team-taught again facilitating an ambitious inter-institutional, multi-site project in Pomona and Claremont, California.

Many films have been produced about her work including Right Out of History; The Making of Judy Chicago's Dinner Party by Johanna Demetrakas; documentaries on Womanhouse, the Birth Project, The Holocaust Project and Resolutions; and two films produced by the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Under Wraps and The Other Side of the Picture. E Entertainment Television included Judy Chicago in its three part program, World's Most Intriguing Women.

In 1996, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA, became the repository for Chicago's papers. Chicago is the first living artist to be included in this major archive, one already being used by scholars researching Judy Chicago's work, for example, the art historian, Gail Levin, who consulted the Schlesinger archives from her upcoming biography of Judy Chicago.

In retrospect it now seems that "The Dinner Party" came out of a social, feminist context as well as an art world one. That for the time was daring, to say the least. Whether you like "The Dinner Party" or not, it changed art. It was an event as much as an artwork. Chicago may not have done it all alone, but she certainly did not have a big New York gallery behind her. Furthermore, her art since "The Dinner Party" confirms that beginning with that work Chicago was after the really big subjects, something even now most artists shy away from for fear of embarrassment, making a mistake, or merely because the commercial art world can't handle other than formal topics or adolescent self-indulgence.

So on the elevator up to the 4th floor I was still wondering about how the actual "Dinner Party" would look and work. There were the now-familiar banners: "And She Gathered All before Her", etc. I turned the corner and there it was. A huge triangular banquet table with 39 place-settings, each one honoring a particular woman in myth and then history. It was still breathtaking. And I, like the others in the crowd, moved counterclockwise from setting to setting from the Primordial Goddess, to Ishtar, to Hatshepsut, to Saint Bridget, through Emily Dickinson, through Virginia Woolf and ending with Georgia O'Keeffe. Every setting tells a story, through the "decorated" ceramic plate and the related needlework runner. What I hadn"t remembered was that the plates got wilder, more three-dimensional, and more vaginal as you move through time around the table.

What is there left for me to say? This time the press response is favorable indeed, certainly in The Times and in The Voice. But what I can say is that what really pleases me is that this is a really nervy, shocking artwork. It is still over-the-top. It pretends to be rational and didactic, which in many ways it is. But the vision of vagina dinner plates at a women’s banquet is exactly what makes "The Dinner Party" far out…and effective. It sometimes takes a bit of wildness to get a point across. So now we probably need a retrospective to put "The Dinner Party" in the context of Chicago's work before and after. Wouldn't it be great if a retrospective accompanied the opening of the permanent installation of "The Dinner Party" at Brooklyn?³