Judy Chicago

SANTA FE, N.M.—Judy Chicago’s name has been synonymous with feminist art since her monumental installation The Dinner Party first made jaws drop at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979. The unforgettably formidable, 48-foot installation—featuring a cavalcade of vaginal forms on a banquet table honoring 1,000 historically significant females—dominated art headlines during its heyday; while Chicago went on to create other female-centered artworks.

Now, more than three decades later, Chicago’s pièce de résistance is making headlines again, having found a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum’s new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, set to be unveiled March 23. And pieces of her work will be featured in the upcoming traveling exhibition “WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution,” opening March 4 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Chicago spoke to ArtInfo from her New Mexico studio about overcoming the years of adversity that came with her focus on creating feminist art, the trials and tribulations of finding a permanent space for The Dinner Party, and the impact she thinks the piece will have in a new era for women.

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First, let’s talk about The Dinner Party finding a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum. What does that mean for you personally, 27 years after the piece first appeared in San Francisco?

It means that I’ve finally achieved the goal I set 27 years ago—it just took a lot longer than I thought. When I did The Dinner Party, it was with the goal of trying to overcome the erasure of women’s achievements in art. If it could be permanently housed, then that could be part of overcoming that erasure as well. Its initial success made me think it would happen sooner, but instead the art system closed down and I was really devastated.

But many, many years of effort later, it’s happened, thanks to the vision of the Sackler Center, and thanks to the people who stood by me all those years and made sure The Dinner Party was cared for until it was permanently housed. Through the Flower, an organization I created in the late 1970s quite by accident, provided a framework for people to be able to participate in its preservation, and it attests to the power of individuals to make a difference.

Why do you think this work has endured so well and struck a chord with so many people?

For me personally, what the impact of The Dinner Party demonstrates is the potential power of art, and it’s way beyond anything I ever dreamed. I did not have what usually propels artists into visibility—a strong gallery, a major curator or a critic. I only had my art and the support of individuals who were moved by my art. It attests to what art could be if it addresses what people care about in a way that’s accessible. Art programs teach artists to speak in tongues—even too much feminist art is inaccessible and coded—but I set out to combine the quality of high art with accessibility and meaningful forms, to open up and expand the audience for contemporary art.

Over the years, critics have begun to respond more positively to your art. Do you think that acceptance represents a positive step forward for women-centered art?

Of course it does. The Dinner Party came into the world when the whole modern art movement was still holding sway. The Dinner Party represented an incredible challenge to modern art, and there were many reasons it incurred so much resistance. Now, generations have been raised on The Dinner Party and feminist contemporary theory, so The Dinner Party is not as shocking to them as it was to the generation that first saw it. What you saw at first was shock, horror, outrage—it’s sort of like the old-fashioned stories you hear about the Impressionists, except it happened to me.

Some observers have lamented the institutionalization of feminist art, saying that the Sackler Center and “WACK” show take away from feminist art’s radical nature. What’s your take on this?

I don’t agree with that at all. Why shouldn’t feminist art become part of our cultural institutions? It’s not the first avant-garde or radical art movement to become part of the mainstream. It’s true there is an effort in some institutions—in particular, the Museum of Modern Art—to try and disconnect feminist art from its radical roots, but I think the job of feminist art is to enter institutions and broaden the role of art, not only with a female content in art, but in ways of making art. What I don’t want to see is feminist art ghetto-ized in some little corner, scuttled off to the side of the major exhibitions.