The Story of Art Without Men

by Katy Hessel

I wanted to end this section with what I like to think of as the ‘icon’ of the decade: The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago: a monumental installation honouring thirty-nine Western historical and mythological women in the form of place settings. Collectively worked on by more than 100 women between 1974 and 1979, The Dinner Party stretches across a colossal, purposefully non-hierarchical, ‘Minimalist’ triangle, as if to finally award women a ‘seat at the table’. Each place incorporates a yonic-shaped ceramic plate and hand-embroidered cloth (materials traditionally dismissed as ‘feminine’ and ‘decorative’) emblazoned with the name of a notable woman: from artists Artemisia Gentileschi and Georgia O’Keeffe, writer Virginia Woolf and poet Emily Dickinson, women’s suffrage activist Susan B. Anthony and abolitionist Sojourner Truth. Housed in the centre on shiny, porcelain tiles are the names of a further 999 notable women. Theatrical and vast, visiting The Dinner Party is like embarking on a pilgrimage, complete with medievalesque flags drenched in rich, regal colours. Although undoubtedly significant, in recent times this work has been criticised for its severe non-white representation: only one woman of colour has been ‘invited’. Critically responding to the work in 2019, artist and activist Patricia Kaersenhout constructed Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Too? to lionise women of colour, such as activist and drag queen Marsha P. Johnson and Haitian revolutionary Sanité Bélair.