Finding a Voice

In the 1970's the role of women in society was in a flux like it never had been before in recorded History; despite their clear presence and importance, women had been ignored, and cast into specific culturally defined roles.¹ Judy Chicago's massive multimedia sculpture, The Dinner Party, was her attempt to rectify and draw public attention to forgotten women, their roles, and the struggle to gain equal rights and recognition.² Like Cindy Sherman's use of herself as a model in her Untitled Film Stills series to focus attention on the way society looks at women, literally, Chicago used the dinner tables as a comment about how women were expected to fit into a domestic role, but she set the tables for women of note.³ Her original idea of “a feminist Last Supper” with 13 places gave way as her research showed that the number of important, but disregarded women was far larger than it might seem, which led her to include 39 settings and 999 tiles each representing one specific ignored woman.⁴ The repeated patterns of the triangular tiles in the triangular floor ringed by tables produces an effect not unlike Magdalena Abakanowicz's 80 Backs fiber sculpture, which symbolically depicts individuals being “lost in a crowd” and speaks to the marginalization of the women both individually and collectively.⁵

Bibliography

Abakanowicz, Magdalena. “80 Backs.” 1976-1980 (Museum of Modern Art, Dallas). In Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed., by Fred Kleiner, Figure 15-26. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013.

Chicago, Judy. “The Dinner Party.” Multimedia, including ceramics and stitchery, 1979 (Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn). In Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed., by Fred Kleiner, Figure 15-24. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013.

Kleiner, Fred. Gardner's Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013.

1 Fred Kleiner, Gardner's Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed., (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013), 438-9.

2 Ibid., 439.

3 Ibid., 439.

4 Ibid., 438-9.

5 Judy Chicago, “The Dinner Party,” multimedia, including ceramics and stitchery, 1979 (Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn). In Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed., by Fred Kleiner, Figure 15-24. (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013), 438.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, “80 Backs,” 1976-1980 (Museum of Modern Art, Dallas). In Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed., by Fred Kleiner, Figure 15-26. (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013), 440.

Kleiner, 438-40.