Reception: Friday, May 4, 5:30–7:30

Santa Fe, New Mexico – Currently the subject of significant renewed international media and art world attention, Judy Chicago’s iconic monument to the women’s movement, The Dinner Party, just opened in its permanent home at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the first public space of its kind in the United States.

In commemoration of this important milestone, LewAllen Contemporary is pleased to present a special opportunity to view rare pieces of preparatory work from this major landmark in art history. The pieces on exhibit have never before been shown or available for acquisition and include examples of the few existing ceramic test plates for some of the 39 iconic place settings on the table of The Dinner Party as well as china painting test plates, illuminated capital letter studies, runner and plate drawings, and the original large-scale cartoons for The Dinner Party’s moving entryway banners.

The exhibition, titled History in the Making: Preparatory Materials from The Dinner Party, is likely to be the most significant and historically important gallery show of the year in Santa Fe, the nation’s second-largest art market. Chicago’s unfolding development of The Dinner Party is revealed in this body of preparatory art created from 1975 to 1978. The 50 diverse works included in the exhibition are remarkable examples of Judy Chicago’s artistry and of her vision for a world in which the accomplishments of all individuals are encouraged and honored, regardless of gender or other social categories, and in which typically “female” virtues such as cooperation and mutual support are valued.

As installed in its new home at the Brooklyn Museum, The Dinner Party is a massive ceremonial banquet in multi-media art, laid on a triangular table measuring 48 feet on each side, that combines the glory of sacramental tradition with the intimate detail of a social gathering. Thirty-nine guests of honor, mythical and historic women whose accomplishments were largely erased from male-dominated histories, are represented by individually symbolic, oversized, hand-painted porcelain plates and intricately needleworked table runners. The table is set upon the enormous Heritage Floor comprised of over two thousand hand-cast, gilded and lustered tiles inscribed with the names of 999 other women of importance. The importance of these women is explicated in the Heritage Panels—large, wall-mounted, hand-colored photo murals in which their accomplishments are arranged chronologically, thus providing additional historical context for the 39 guests of honor. The exhibition is introduced by six stunningly woven and poetic Entryway Banners, all six drawings for which are included in the Santa Fe show.

The Dinner Party elevates achievement by women to a heroic state traditionally and inequitably reserved for men. Nearly three decades after it was first exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979 and after an enormously popular world-wide tour followed by years in storage, the permanent installation of The Dinner Party at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York provides a fitting home for this world-renowned monument to the feminist movement. It joins important milestones in art history as a dramatic example of the power of art to shatter conventions, change the world and effect personal and social transformation.

The Dinner Party installation was conceived by Chicago and executed over five years—from 1974 to 1979—by 400 artisans working under her supervision. Each plate in The Dinner Party is an independent work of art and features an image based on Chicago’s vulvar and butterfly iconography, a symbolic representation of the female core intended by the artist as an affirmation of empowered female agency. The plates reside atop elaborate runners decorated with historically significant details associated with the women honored. The first name of each woman begins with an illuminated capital letter magnificently incorporating a small symbol or motif that references the subject’s importance.

The Dinner Party dominated art headlines during its early history and, though enormously popular with the more than a million viewers who saw it in a dozen cities worldwide, it bore the brunt of hostile opposition from some quarters of the art world who saw it as an assault on modernist traditions, from the political right who felt threatened by its feminist agenda.

Perhaps emblematic of how much things have changed, today it is permanently ensconced in one of the world’s great art museums and is considered, in the words of renowned critic Arthur C. Danto, “one of the major artistic monuments of the second half of the 20th century.” It has influenced the lives and work of thousands of people and has become the iconic example of how art can change the world. Roberta Smith in The New York Times said that it has become “almost as much a part of American culture as Norman Rockwell, Walt Disney, W.P.A. murals and the AIDS quilt.” Newsweek named it as one of the “Ten Works That Have Rocked the Ages.” The canonical authority on art history, Janson & Janson’s A Basic History of Western Art, recently labeled it “the great monument to the women’s movement” and described it as a foundational part of post-modernism. Time magazine called it “the Liberty Bell of women’s history.”

The remarkable preparatory materials in the exhibition at LewAllen Contemporary embody the spirit of The Dinner Party and the aspiration that Judy Chicago brings to all of her art—to heal the world and promote social justice. These values will be heralded in a special symposium on the second weekend of the exhibition, May 11-13, in Santa Fe. Presented by the Santa Fe Art Institute and LewAllen Contemporary in association with the the nonprofit feminist organization, Through the Flower, it is planned as a series of lively, informative and important discussions reflecting on the historic and symbolic significance of The Dinner Party as a beacon for encouraging diversity of aesthetic narrative in the world of fine art and also expanding the role of art in effecting personal and social transformation.

The exhibition, History in the Making, runs from Friday, May 4, through Sunday, June 18. A reception for the artist will be held opening day, 5:30-7:30.

The symposium, “The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago: Its Historical Significance and Influence,” begins with a public lecture by Judy Chicago, Friday evening, May 11, and concludes Sunday noon, May 13. Symposium brochure is available by contacting LewAllen Contemporary. Normal gallery hours are 9:30-5:30 M-Th, 9:30-6:30 Friday and 11:00-5:00 Sunday.

For further information, please contact Diane Kell at (505) 988-8997 or [email protected].