The Dinner Party

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For the play written by Neil Simon in 2000, see "The Dinner Party (play)"

For the Seinfeld episode, see "The Dinner Party (Seinfeld episode)"

Cover of Judy Chicago’s 1996 book describing the work

The Dinner Party is a work by feminist artist Judy Chicago depicting place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women throughout history. It was produced from 1974 to 1979 by a collaboration of many individual women and first exhibited in 1979.

Judy Chicago stated the purpose of the work as "The Dinner Party was meant to end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record."

The table is triangular and measures forty-eight feet on each side. Each place setting features a placemat / tablecloth with the woman's name and artworks relating to the woman's life, along with a napkin, utensils, glass / goblet, and a plate. The plates all feature a butterfly- or flower-like sculpture, representing the woman's vulva. "The Dinner Party elevates female achievement in Western history to a heroic scale traditionally reserved for men.

A collaborative effort of many female artists, The Dinner Party celebrates traditional female accomplishments such as weaving, china painting, embroidery, and sewing which have historically been framed as craft or domestic art.

The white floor of triangular porcelain tiles is inscribed with the names of 999 other notable women.

Since 2002 the home of the work has been the Brooklyn Museum of Art. It was gifted to the museum by The Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. It is now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum within the Elizabeth A Sackler Center for Feminist Art which opened in March 2007.

[edit] Women represented in the work

The first wing of the triangular table has place settings for women from Primordial Goddesses of prehistory through to Hypatia of classical Rome. This section symbolises the emergence and decline of the Classical world.

The second wing begins with Marcella, and denotes the rise of Christianity. It concludes with Anna van Schurman in the seventeenth century.

The third wing represents the Age of revolutions. It begins with Anne Hutchinson and moves through the twentieth century to the final places paying tribute to Virginia Woolf and Georgia O'Keeffe,

The 39 women with places at the table are:-

Wing I: From Prehistory to the Roman Empire
1. Primordial Goddess
2. Fertile Goddess
3. Ishtar
4. Kali
5. Snake Goddess
6. Sophia
7. Amazon
8. Hatshepsut
9. Judith
10. Sappho
11. Aspasia
12. Boudica
13. Hypatia