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Feminist art came about in the 1960s. Modernism had established that art was more than just a visual aesthetic--it was now about how the viewer interacted with the art, and how they interpreted it. Feminist art relied on that, as artists in this movement sought to introduce the female point of view. Because women had previously not been included in the art world, feminist artists had to be creative to get their work out there, and this included alternative venues and really unusual, creative mediums, like textiles, performance, and video. Feminist art can seem quite disjointed, as works in this movement don't all fall under one description. Instead, it's a variety of mediums all with the same goal: to promote the need for gender equality, and to make the female experience more visible.

According to arthistoryarchive.com, feminist art has these two objectives:

1. How is a woman's gaze different from a man's? How does that difference influence the ways in which the two genders view the world? And how they view art?

2. What constitutes obscenity and pornography? Where do they come from? What are their results? Are they always transgressive? What place do they have in art?

Here's a great overview of the movement:

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"Because we are denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of standing upon each other's shoulders and building upon each other's hard earned accomplishments. Instead we are condemned to repeat what others have done before us and thus we continually reinvent the wheel."

"My images speak of vulnerability that is wedded to strength, not weakness."

Summary of Feminist Art

The Feminist Art movement in the West emerged in the late 1960s amidst the fervor of American anti-war demonstrations and burgeoning gender, civil, and queer rights movements around the world. Harkening back to the utopian ideals of early-20th-century modernist movements, Feminist artists sought to rewrite a falsely male-dominated art history, change the contemporary world around them through their art, intervene in the established art world, and challenge the existing art canon. Feminist Art created opportunities and spaces that previously did not exist for women and minority artists, as well as paved the path for the Identity and Activist Art genres of the 1980s. However, the contributions and influences of women artists from a number of countries should not be overlooked, such as German Dadaist Hannah Höch and Mexican Surrealist Frida Kahlo, whose powerful works have served as a source of inspiration for Feminist artists around the world since the early twentieth century.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

Feminist artists sought to create a dialogue between the viewer and the artwork through the inclusion of women's perspective. Art was not merely an object for aesthetic admiration, but could also incite the viewer to question the social and political landscape, and through this questioning, possibly affect the world and bring change toward equality. As artist Suzanne Lacy declared, the goal of Feminist Art was to "influence cultural attitudes and transform stereotypes."

Before feminism, the majority of women artists were invisible to the public eye. They were oftentimes denied exhibitions and gallery representation based on the sole fact of their gender. The art world was largely known, or promoted as, a boy's club, of which sects like the hard drinking, womanizing members of Abstract Expressionism were glamorized. To combat this, Feminist artists created alternative venues as well as worked to change established institutions' policies to promote women artists' visibility within the market.

Feminist artists often embraced alternative materials that were connected to the female gender to create their work, such as textiles, or other media previously little used by men such as performance and video, which did not have the same historically male-dominated precedent that painting and sculpture carried. By expressing themselves through these non-traditional means, women sought to expand the definition of fine art, and to incorporate a wider variety of artistic perspectives.

Feminist Art does not geographically discriminate but rather connects female voices worldwide. Notable Feminist artists over the movement's decades-long lifespan have spanned the globe representing a diverse array of countries including America, Britain, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and more as women continue to fight for equal rights and visibility within their distinct cultural landscapes.

Since the 1990s, Feminist Art and discourse has taken on an "intersectional" approach, as many Feminist artists explore not only their gender identity through their art, but also their racial, queer, (dis)-abled, and other aspects of identity that inform who they are in the world.

Overview of Feminist Art

In 1971 at the California Institute of the Arts, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro founded the first Feminist Art program. Chicago said she was "scared to death of what I'd unleashed," but, at the same time, "I had watched a lot of young women come up with me through graduate school only to disappear, and I wanted to do something about it." They did do something: she and Schapiro founded Womanhouse, a space for collaborative Feminist Art projects, that became a foundational model for the movement.

Artworks and Artists of Feminist Art

Womanhouse

Artist: Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro

The installation Womanhouse encompassed an entire house in residential Hollywood organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro as the culmination of the Feminist Art Program (FAP) at California Institute for the Arts in 1972. The twenty-one all-female students first renovated the house, which had been previously marked for demolition, then installed site-specific art environments within the interior spaces that ranged from the sculptural figure of a woman trapped within a linen closet to the kitchen where walls and ceiling were covered with fried eggs that morphed into breasts. Many of the artists also created performances that took place within Womanhouse to further address the relationship between women and the home.

The entire collaborative piece was about a woman's reclaiming of domestic space from one in which she was positioned as merely a wife and mother to one in which she was seen as a fully expressive being unconfined by gender assignment. This challenged traditional female roles and gave women a new realm to present their views within a thoroughly integrated context of art and life.

Mixed media site installation

ArtForum Advertisement

Artist: Lynda Benglis

In 1974, when artist Lynda Benglis was feeling underrepresented in the male-heavy art community, she reacted by creating a series of advertisements placed in magazines that took critical stabs at traditional depictions of women in the media. Her most famous ad was run in ArtForum in which she promoted her upcoming show at Paula Cooper Gallery by posing nude, holding a double-headed dildo, with sunglasses covering her eyes. She paid $3,000 for the ad, a small price for something that would establish her as a major player in Feminist Art history. Also, by paying for the ad, Benglis was able to assure her voice would be heard without editing or censorship. She later cast a series of sculptures of the dildo, bent into a smile, a cheeky "f*** you" to the male-dominated art institutions.

Anatomy of a Kimono

Artist: Miriam Schapiro

Anatomy of a Kimono is one of many "femmages" Schapiro created, starting in the mid-1970s, and is based on the patterns of Japanese kimonos, fans, and robes. Schapiro used the term femmage to describe works that combined collage, painting, fabric, embroidery, and other "high art" and "decorative art" techniques, simultaneously highlighting women's relation to those materials and processes.

Here, the artist collected donated handkerchiefs while touring the country and cobbled them together with other fabrics to form ten large panels filled with Japanese-inspired shapes. The work adopts the monumental scale of Abstract Expressionist canvases, but by using fabric instead of paint, Schapiro elevates a utilitarian and feminine material to the realm of "high art."

Fabric and acrylic on canvas - Private Collection

Semiotics of the Kitchen

Artist: Martha Rosler

Now one of the canonical works of feminist video art, Semiotics of the Kitchen examines women's bondage within the context of home through the trope of the televised cooking show. In it, we see Rosler as a self-described "anti-Julia Child" as she picks up an alphabetized stream of kitchen utensils (some strange and antiquated) and gives them random names before violently demonstrating their use with pantomime. The woman and her implements disrupt the familiar system of everyday meanings - the safely understood signs of food production erupt into anger. In listing the kitchen implements, states Rosler, "when the woman speaks, she names her own oppression." She, like many feminist artists of the 1970s, wished to interrupt and change the preconceived notions about women's roles within the home, and how these were represented in mass media.

Black and white video with sound - Electronic Arts Intermix

Interior Scroll

Artist: Carolee Schneemann

At a 1975 exhibition called "Women Here and Now", Carolee Schneemann performed the unforgettable Interior Scroll. For the piece, she undressed in front of an audience until she was wearing only an apron. Then, while reading from her book Cézanne, She was a Great Painter (1975), she began to paint her body. Afterwards, she stripped completely and shockingly began to pull a scroll of paper from her vagina while reading its contents aloud. The text was inspired by a recording she had made of a filmmaker talking about women and how they were unable to access certain traits such as logic and rationality, which he described as specifically male. He concluded that women were only capable of stereotypical attributes such as intuition, emotion, etc. By pulling the scroll from literally inside her own body, Schneemann made the point that only a woman could truly represent the female experience or speak on its behalf - anything else was hearsay. By placing her vagina front and center, and using it to birth a provocative message, she proved no longer interested in suppressing the authentic feminine, or asking permission to fully inhabit her female sexuality or reality.

The Dinner Party

Artist: Judy Chicago

The Dinner Party is one of the most well-known pieces of Feminist Art in existence and is permanently housed at the Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The installation consists of a large banquet table with place settings for thirty-nine notable women from history and mythology. The settings have gold ceramic chalices and porcelain plates painted with butterfly- and vulva-inspired designs representing Mother Nature, the vagina, and the life-giving properties of being female. By doing this, Chicago offered unabashed femininity on the plate rather than a meal cooked by a woman whose identity would be cloaked passively behind her food offering. In addition to the thirty-nine settings, there are the names of 999 other women painted on the tiles below the triangular table.

The Dinner Party participates in the feminist revision of history, initiated during the 1970s, in which artists worked to rediscover lost role models for women, rewriting the past that had previously only included male voices. In the combination of intricately wrought textiles, tile, and porcelain, Chicago reclaimed the realm of "high art" to include what had traditionally been relegated to the lower status of "women's work."

Painted porcelain plates, silverware, chalices, fabric, tiles - The Brooklyn Museum, New York City

Untitled (I shop therefore I am)

Artist: Barbara Kruger

This piece is characteristic of Kruger's early work, depicting a phrase placed over a photographic image from a newspaper or magazine. Kruger first worked in magazine advertising, and used her graphic design expertise in her art. The slogan in this work refers to images of women in the media, specifically product advertisements designed for women, which are usually created by men. It is a reminder that most of the media that is geared toward women is based on men's assumptions about women's desires, lives, and ideals, interrogating the belief that women only need material objects to feel happy and that men can keep them under their control by those means. Kruger's work is accessible and direct, and was incredibly influential among the artists of the 1980s.

Photographic Silkscreen/Vinyl

THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING A WOMAN ARTIST

Artist: The Guerrilla Girls

This is one of the Guerrilla Girls' early posters, and exemplifies their strategy of using humor to defuse and break down discrimination and prejudice within the art world. Adopting a tongue-in-cheek tone, they list the "advantages" that still faced women artists in the late 1980s, like "Knowing your career might pick up after you're eighty."

Guerilla Girl "Lee Krasner" stated, "The world of High Art, the kind that gets into museums and history books, is run by a very small group of people. Our posters have proved over and over again that these people, no matter how smart or good-intentioned, have been biased against women and artists of color." This poster reflects how pervasive that bias was in 1989, despite almost two decades of feminist activism. The fact that the Guerrilla Girls are still making posters and appearing globally implies that this problem persists to this day.

Poster

Beginnings of Feminist Art

Feminist art production in the West began in the late 1960s, during the "second-wave" of feminism in the United States and England, but was preceded by a long history of feminist activism. The "first wave" of feminism began in the mid-19th century with the women's suffrage movements and continued until women received the right to vote in 1920. Organized feminist activism then effectively ceased until the late 1960s, but women's concern about their role in society certainly remained.

Artists that expressed some of these concerns in their work have been posthumously identified as proto-feminist. For example, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois created works that contained imagery dealing with the female body, personal experience, and ideas of domesticity, even if the artists did not explicitly identify with feminism. Others, such as the German-American Anni Albers and the English Vanessa Bell worked to elevate media that was previously seen as "women's work" and "handicrafts," such as weaving and pottery-making, to the status of "art."

These subjects were later embraced by the Feminist Art movement that began producing work during the resurgence of the larger women's movement in the late 1960s. The American Feminist artists of this "second-wave" of feminism expanded on previous themes by linking their artwork explicitly to the fight for gender equality and including a wider visual vocabulary to help describe their goals. As Andrea Giunta, Argentinian art historian, notes, "these processes were paralleled in Latin America and Europe," with notable developments occurring in Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia. Just as American women artists were identifying statistics that demonstrated their underrepresentation in major arts institutions, so were Latin American women artists noting very similar discrepancies.

The United Nation's first World Conference on Women was, in fact, held in Mexico City in 1975, and was focused on addressing issues that women face around the world (including domestic abuse, feminicide, and lack of access to education, among many others) and on identifying potential policy changes to improve these issues in numerous countries. The conference was followed by a high number of exhibitions and events that foregrounded the work of women and Feminist artists in Mexico and beyond, with much communication and collaboration between American Feminist artists and international Feminist artists driving Feminist art making worldwide in the following years and decades.

The 1970s

In New York City, which had a firmly established gallery and museum system, women artists were largely concerned with equal representation in art institutions. They formed a variety of women's art organizations, like the Art Worker's Coalition, Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) and the AIR Gallery, to specifically address Feminist artists' rights and issues in the art community. These organizations protested museums like The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney, which exhibited few, if any, women artists. Protests of the Whitney Annual led to a rise in the number of women artists presented, from ten percent in 1969 to twenty-three percent in 1970.

In California, women artists focused on creating a new and separate space for women's art, rather than fighting an established system. In 1972, artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, who were co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts' Feminist Art Program, organized the project Womanhouse, which encompassed an entire property in Los Angeles at which various female artists contributed on-site installations. In 1973, Chicago along with graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, and art historian Arlene Raven created the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW) - a two-year program for women in the arts that covered Feminist studio practice as well as theory and criticism. The FSW was a part of the Woman's Building in Los Angeles, which was created by Feminist artists as an inclusive space for all women in the community, and contained gallery space, a cafe, a bookstore, and offices for a feminist magazine, among other resources.

Art critics also played a large role in the 1970s Feminist Art movement by calling attention to the fact that women artists had been completely omitted from the canon of Western art. They were important advocates who sought to rewrite male-established criteria of art criticism and aesthetics. In 1971, ARTnews published critic Linda Nochlin's provocatively titled an essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" The essay critically examined the category of "greatness" (as it had largely been defined in male-dominated terms) and initiated the Feminist revision of art history that led to the inclusion of more women artists in art history books. In 1973, England's art critics Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock founded the Women's Art History Collective to further address the omission of women from the Western art historical canon. In 1976, Nochlin and fellow art historian Ann Sutherland Harris organized the first international female-only exhibition "Women Artists: 1550-1950" to familiarize the public with 400 years worth of work that had gone largely unrecognized.

The 1980s

With the end of the 1970s, an era of radical idealism in the arts came to a close with the new conservatism of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. The Feminist artists of the 1980s focused more on psychoanalysis and Postmodern theory, which examined the body in a more intellectually removed manner than the embodied female experience that dominated the art of the 1970s. Artists continued to expand the definition of Feminist Art and although they were not always aligned with a coherent social movement, their works still expressed the need for women's equality. The Feminist artists of the 1970s made many advances, but women were still not close to equal representation.

This continued discrepancy spawned the Guerrilla Girls, a group formed in 1985, best known for fighting against sexism and racism in the art world by protesting, speaking, and performing at various venues while wearing gorilla masks and adopting pseudonyms to hide their identity to avoid real-world repercussions for speaking out against powerful institutions. The Guerrilla Girls took Feminist Art in a new direction by plastering posters all over New York and eventually buying advertising space for their images. Their posters used humor and clean design to express a pointed, political message. Other 1980s Feminist artists such as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger also focused on mass communication that drew on the visual vocabulary of advertising in both use of graphics and the distillation of complex political statements into catchy slogans. These artists sought the destruction of male-dominant social precepts, and focused less on the differences between men and women associated with 1970s Feminist Art.

Feminist Art: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

A Multi-Disciplinary Movement

There is no singular medium or style that unites Feminist artists, as they often combined aspects from various movements including Conceptual art, Body art, and Video art into works that presented a message about women's experience and the need for gender equality.

Feminist Art and Performance art often crossed paths during the 1970s and beyond, as performance was a direct way for women artists to communicate a physical, visceral message. It had the impact of being face-to-face with the viewer, which made it more difficult to disregard. Performance kept the work on a highly personal level, as there was no separation between the artists and the work itself.

Body art was another medium that was conducive to Feminist artistic concerns, as it provided a means to convey an immediate message to the viewer that was unequivocally connected to the personal space of the artist. Often Body and Performance art overlapped in Feminist Art.

Video art emerged in the art world just a few years before Feminist Art, and provided a medium, unlike painting or sculpture, that did not have a historic precedent set by male artists. Video was viewed as a catalyst that could initiate a media revolution, placing the tools for television broadcasting in the hands of the public, and thus providing the Feminist Art movement with vast potential to reach a broader audience. The Woman's Building housed the Los Angeles Women's Video Center (LAWVC), which provided women artists with unprecedented access to the expensive new equipment required for making video art.

Gender Performance

Mierle Laderman Ukeles explored the idea of women's work with her Maintenance Work series (1973), in which she eliminated the separation between art and life by performing typical household chores within the museum. Viewers had to walk around her while she cleaned the steps of the entrance, and common tasks were made into art that could not be ignored. Carolee Schneemann pulled a scroll from her vagina in public, a shocking attempt to reclaim the vagina to its rightful place as sacred source and birth passage. Yoko Ono revealed her own vulnerability in a performance where she sat submissively on stage as audience members were invited to cut off her clothes. By sharing gender specific experiences with audiences, these artists were using the "knowledge is power" model to influence new ways of thinking about traditional female stereotypes and to inspire empathy and compassion for the female condition.

Body as Medium

Artists often distorted images of their bodies, changed their bodies with other materials or performed self-mutilation not only to shock, but to convey a deeply felt experience in the most visceral manner. Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta used blood and her own body in her performances, creating a primal, but not violent, connection between the artist's body, blood, and the audience (and nature). Mendieta and many other Feminist artists saw blood as an important symbol of life and fertility directly connected to women's bodies.

Sexual Equality and De-Objectification

Many Feminist artists illuminated an imperative to end sexism and oppression with works that went against the traditional ideas of women as merely beautiful objects to be visually enjoyed. As Lucy Lippard stated, "When women use their own bodies in their art work, they are using their selves; a significant psychological factor converts these bodies or faces from object to subject." These works compelled viewers to question society's social and political norms.

For example, Dara Birnbaum used video art to deconstruct women's representation in mass media by appropriating images from television broadcasts into her video-collages, re-presenting them in a new context. In her most prominent piece, the 1978-79 video Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, she used images from the popular hit television show to expose its sexist subtexts. Birnbaum's peer Judith Bernstein was known for using sexually explicit images, many drawing reference from the male phallus and reminiscent of signs that might be found in a graffiti-scrawled men's restroom. Her monumental drawing Horizontal (1973) consists of a domineering, swirling screw - a metaphorical jab at male domination.

Domesticity and Family Life

Miriam Schapiro coined the term "femmage" to describe works she began to make in the 1970s that combined fabric, paint, and other materials through "traditional women's techniques - sewing, piercing, hooking, cutting, appliqueing, cooking and the like..." This put a spotlight on "women's work" as a viable contribution to the category of traditional "high art." Artists Faith Wilding and Harmony Hammond, among others, used fabric in their work to interrogate the deletion of feminine crafts from the arts.

Martha Rosler explored the various facets of female and domestic life. In her A Budding Gourmet (1974), we see a video of a woman describing efforts to improve herself and her family through gourmet cooking. Her dialogue is randomly interrupted with slides showing glossy images from food and travel magazines meant to depict consumerism's baiting of the everyday housewife.

Making and Reshaping Art History

Many feminist artists made work intended to show the inequity in the absence of women from historical cultural texts and documentation. In Judy Chicago's seminal Dinner Party, 1974-1979, credit is given toward the influence of women such as Frida Kahlo, Lee Krasner, Gertrude Stein, and many others on contemporary female artists. One artist particularly concerned with toppling unfair male domination was Nancy Spero. Her Notes in Time (1979) is a long scroll-like work that explores the place of women throughout history, traveling across epochs, continents, time and space, lending them overdue documentation and significance.

Later Developments - After Feminist Art

Perhaps Kiki Smith said it best, when describing the major impact the Feminist Art movement had on the art world of its time: "I would say that without the feminist movement I wouldn't exist; and an enormous amount of the artwork that we take for granted wouldn't exist; and a lot of the subject matter that we assume can be encompassed by art wouldn't exist. The feminist movement exponentially expanded what art is, and how we look at art, and who is considered to be included in the discourse of art making. I think that it caused a tremendous, radical change. You don't want to have a cultural notion that one specific gender embodies creativity. All humanity - and all aspects of gender and sexuality and how people define themselves -are inherently creative. It's against the interests of the culture at large not to embrace feminism as a model, just like many other models of liberation, because they don't only liberate women, they liberate everybody."

Because of the progress made by previous generations of Feminist artists, many contemporary female artists no longer necessarily feel the responsibility to identify as "women artists" or to explicitly address the "women's perspective." Building on the precedent of the 1980s, many women artists began to produce work that focused on their individual concerns and less on a general feminist message.

Cindy Sherman, for instance, photographed herself in the roles of different iconic stereotypes portrayed in film and history and by doing so she reclaimed those stereotypes while at the same time questioning the male gaze so prevalent in cinematic theory and popular culture. In the 1990s artists such as Tracey Emin showed the influence of Feminist Art by focusing on personal narratives and using non-traditional materials, such as the famous piece My Bed (1998), which consisted of her own slept-in bed strewn with used condoms and blood-stained underwear. These varied practices, even if not directly identified as feminist, grew from and are connected to the first and second generation Feminist artists and critics in the variety of materials, roles, and perspectives they exhibit.

In 2008, the Feminist Art movement was given its proper due in the annals of art history through its first major retrospective titled WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. The seminal exhibition, which originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles featured works from 120 artists and artists' groups from around the world.

Today, much Feminist Art and discourse takes an "intersectional" approach. The concept of intersectionality was first put forth by legal scholar and feminist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989 as a way to acknowledge that aspects of identity, such as gender, race, and sexuality could not be examined in isolation from one another, but rather, should be understood as intersecting aspects of one's being, which overlap and often compound the power disparities that one experiences. Though the term and theory of "intersectionality" first appeared just a few decades ago, looking back through history we see that proto-feminist and Feminist artists have been taking this approach to identity in their art making for much longer. For instance, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo's representation of her gender identity is intricately woven together with her experience of disability, race, and cultural heritage, and South African artist Helen Sebidi's art grapples with her identity as a woman of color, not just as a woman.

The representation of the woman's body and of female sexuality continues to be politically charged and to express the tension between personal and public identity. Today's generation of women artists, like Kara Walker and Jennifer Linton, continue to speak directly about sexism and equality in their works. The topic persistently shows up in works as diverse as Mary Schelpsi's Beauty Interrupted, 2001, which shows a model walking down a runway covered in a blur of the artist's white brush strokes that obscure both her eyes and her rail thin ideal, and Mickalene Thomas' paintings that reframe the identity of African American women while dismantling historical beauty memes. Whereas the Feminist Art movement opened doors for these very important dialogues, female artists continue to pinpoint the exhaustive and never-ending presence of its issues.

Useful Resources on Feminist Art

Similar Art

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Feminist artists fought for representation and fair treatment using video, photography, performances, and even their bodies. Chicago, Wilke, Schapiro, Kruger+

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After the horrors of WWI and WWII, there was a push for greater peace and equality, including anti-war demonstrations and civil and queer rights movements. The movement that had the greatest effect on feminist art, however, was second-wave feminism, caused in large part by the availability of oral contraceptives. This greater awareness of gender inequality caused feminists to push back against the male-dominated art world at a time when it was often treated like a boy's club and encouraged drinking and womanizing. Feminist art was a way to bring attention to women's accomplishments, and their push for equality.

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"Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

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"Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

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Another contributor to the beginning of the feminist art movement Linda Nochlin, who in 1971 published an essay entitled "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"

Nochlin's essay attacks the institution rather than the individual. She pushes back against the idea that women are incapable of greatness, but also against the idea that women have done great things and are simply underappreciated. In a very Virginia Woolf-esque move, she posits that women haven't had the opportunity to do anything great. See the whole essay here:

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The feminist art movement was pioneered by Judy Chicago. Chicago worked at the art department at California State University, and created a unique program for women called the Feminist Art Program. See Chicago's website and bio here:
https://www.judychicago.com/about/biography/

Her most well-known work, The Dinner Party, was created in 1974 with the help of hundreds of volunteers. The Dinner Party is a gigantic, triangular table, measuring about 48 feet on each side. It's meant to commemorate women's accomplishments, providing the long-denied "seat at the table." The table settings include places for Hatshepsut, Emily Dickinson, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This website provides a more in-depth explanation:

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A Place at the Table

The Dinner Party is a monument to women's history and accomplishments. It is a massive triangular table-measuring 48 feet on each side-with thirty-nine place settings dedicated to prominent women throughout history and an additional 999 names are inscribed on the table's glazed porcelain brick base. This tribute to women, which includes individual place settings for such luminary figures as the Primordial Goddess, Ishtar, Hatshepsut, Theodora, Artemesia Gentileschi, Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Sanger, and Georgia O'Keeffe, is beautifully crafted. Each place setting has an exquisitely embroidered table runner that includes the name of the woman, utensils, a goblet, and a plate.

The Dinner Party was intended to be exhibited in a large, darkened, sanctuary-like room, with each place setting individually lit, making it look as though it is composed of thirty-nine altars. The 999 names, written in gold, gleam softly, suggesting a hallowed or liminal space. Five years in the making (1974-1979) and the product of the volunteer labor of more than 400 people, The Dinner Party is a testament to the power of feminist vision and artistic collaboration. It was also a testament to Chicago's ability to create a work of art that spoke to people who had not previously been a part of the art world. When the exhibition opened at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco in March of 1979, it was mobbed. Judy Chicago's accompanying lecture was completely sold out.

Although critics praised the table runners, they ignored or disparaged the plates. These ceramic objects, which become increasingly three-dimensional during the procession from prehistory to the present in order to represent women rising, look somewhat like flowers and butterflies. They also resemble female genitalia, which many people found disturbing. Writing for the feminist journal Frontiers in 1981, Lolette Kuby was so taken aback by the plates' forms that she suggested that Playboy and Penthouse had done more to promote the beauty of female anatomy than The Dinner Party ever could.

Kuby's distaste for

was echoed more forcefully a decade later, when Chicago attempted to donate the artwork to the University of the District of Columbia. Chicago was forced to withdraw her donation after the U.S. Senate threatened to withhold funding from UDC if they accepted what Rep. Robert Dornan characterized as "3-D ceramic pornography" and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher dismissed as a "spectacle of weird art, weird feminist art at that." It was not until 2007 that The Dinner Party, an icon of feminist art, would find a permanent home in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Feminist Education

What drove Chicago to embark on such a large and controversial feminist project? She was inspired, in part, by her pioneering work in feminist education. She started the Feminist Art Program at California State University, Fresno in 1970. The following year she founded the Feminist Art Program (FAP) at the newly established California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) with the abstract painter Miriam Schapiro. The galleries were still under construction when Chicago arrived at CalArts, so the FAP had their exhibition in an abandoned mansion that was slated to be demolished shortly after. The resulting installation, Womanhouse, was a testament to Chicago's method of teaching, which begin with

and then progressed to realizing a message through whatever medium was most suitable, whether it was performance, sculpture, or painting.

While at CalArts, Chicago and Schapiro developed the idea of "central core imagery," arguing in a 1973 article published in Womanspace Journal that many women artists making abstract art unconsciously gravitated towards imagery that was anti-phallic. By the time she began working on The Dinner Party, Chicago had come to believe that central core imagery, which celebrated feminine eroticism and fertility, could be used to challenge patriarchal constructions of women. For Chicago, there existed an irreducible difference between men and women, and that difference began with the genitals. Chicago would eventually put vaginal imagery front and center in The Dinner Party.

Right Out of History

After several years of work establishing various feminist art programs in Southern California, Chicago was eager to get back to making her own artwork and resigned from teaching in 1974. Her experience with Womanhouse inspired her to embrace materials that had traditionally been associated with women's crafts, such as embroidery, weaving, and china painting. She was determined to make a monument to women's history using china-painted plates alluding to thirteen specific figures, which she originally planned to hang on the gallery wall. However, she soon realized that there were many more women that she wished to include, and the initial conception of the piece expanded to a large-scale installation with thirty-nine place settings.

An important component of the piece was the educational material that represented the years of research that had been conducted by Chicago's volunteer staff, led by art historian Diane Gelon. The Dinner Party was accompanied by a book of the same title (published by Anchor Books in 1979 and designed by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville) that included the stories behind all 1,038 names. Filmmaker Johanna Demetrakas documented the monumental effort that it took to make this installation in her film Right Out of History: The Making of the Dinner Party.

Not Exactly Playboy or Penthouse

In order to understand The Dinner Party, we must keep in mind that the sculptural painted plates were intended to be metaphors rather than realistic representations. Take, for instance, the final place setting on the table-the one for Georgia O'Keeffe. This plate is the most sculptural piece in the installation. Pink and greenish gray swirls and folds radiate out from a central core framed by fleshy looking folds that seem to have been deliberately spread apart in order to reveal what should be a hidden entrance. The plate can be read as suggestive of female genitalia, but its forms also recall the shape of a butterfly and the reproductive organs of flowers. O'Keeffe was famous for her abstracted paintings of flowers, and and the plate is an homage to some her best-known works, such as Grey Lines With Black, Blue, and Yellow (1923) and Black Iris III (1926), both of which have a central opening framed by folds, or Two Calla Lilies On Pink (1928), which has a similar color palette to the O'Keeffe plate.

Chicago's decision to use vaginal imagery has proven to be powerful. The Dinner Party, having survived rejection, critical dismissal, and political grandstanding, is now considered a key work of contemporary art, and is permanently installed in a dedicated space at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: Restoring Women to History (Arnold L. Lehman, foreword. Brooklyn Museum of Art/The Monacelli Press, 2014).

Jane Gerhard, The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the Power of Popular Feminism, 1970-2007 (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2013).

Gail Levin, Becoming Judy Chicago (New York: Harmony Books. 2007).

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Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party (article) | Khan Academy

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A Place at the Table The Dinner Party is a monument to women's history and accomplishments. It is a massive triangular table-measuring 48 feet on each side-with thirty-nine place settings dedicated to prominent women throughout history and an additional 999 names are inscribed on the table's glazed porcelain brick base.

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The Guerrilla Girls is a New York-based group of feminist artists that was founded in 1985. According to their website, they are seeking to expose ethnic and gender biases using art. In an effort to keep the focus off of their identities and physical appearances, they wear gorilla masks in public and attempt to stay entirely anonymous.

Here is an awesome list published by the Guerrilla Girls in 1989 entitled "The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist:"

- Working without the pressure of success.

- Not having to be in shows with men.

- Having an escape from the art world in your 4 free-lance jobs.

- Knowing your career might pick up after you're eighty.

- Being reassured that whatever kind of art you make it will be labeled feminine.

- Not being stuck in a tenured teaching position.

- Seeing your ideas live on in the work of others.

- Having the opportunity to choose between career and motherhood.

- Not having to choke on those big cigars or paint in Italian suits.

- Having more time to work when your mate dumps you for someone younger.

- Being included in revised versions of art history.

- Not having to undergo the embarrassment of being called a genius.

- Getting your picture in the art magazines wearing a gorilla suit.

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Today, the Guerrilla Girls still fight for female artists to be recognized and appreciated. One of their exhibits shows the back of a nude female wearing a gorilla mask, and has the provocative caption "do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?" The exhibition goes on to explain that "less than 4% of the artists in the Modern Art section are women, but 76% of the nudes are female."

Another work reads "Dear Art Museum: Art is expensive! So is constructing new buildings! We totally get why you can't pay all your employees a living wage!"

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Miriam Schapiro was a colleague of Judy Chicago, and helped found the Feminist Art Program. She collaborated with Chicago once more when they created the Womanhouse, a rundown Hollywood house that displayed art done by women.

Schapiro dabbled in what she called "femmage," an art form that used typically domestic materials, including fabric, cloth, and paint. Below is an example of femmage, entitled the Beauty of Summer and made with fabric and acrylic:

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Mary Beth Edelson founded the United States' first Conference for Women in the Visual Arts in Washington, D.C., and fought to get women's art into famous exhibits.

She created what is widely considered her most famous piece in 1972, and it was entitled Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper. She took an image of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper and attached the heads of talented female artists to the body and shoulders of the disciples. By putting women in what was traditionally thought to be a male-only space, Edelson opened up a conversation about the art world being a traditionally toxic, male-dominated world.

The female heads that cover the disciples include Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Nancy Graves, Lila Katzen, Lee Krasner, Georgia O'Keeffe, Louise Nevelson, Yoko Ono M. C. Richards, Alma Thomas, and June Wayne. Additionally, famous female heads surround and frame the picture.