Judy Chicago - Feminist Art Icon in the UK

Back in the 1990s I arrived early for a conference at UCLA. With an afternoon to kill before the head action, I stumbled out of the Holiday Inn on Wilshire and into the Armand Hammer Museum, where they were hosting the legendary feminist installation, Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, about which I knew nothing. I didn't even know enough to be ashamed of knowing nothing. But I was blown away. Forget the negative criticism it received from some critics, which along with a good deal of patriarchal defensiveness (it's not really art just craft etc) meant that it was only shown a handful of times - barely into double figures - between 1979 and 2007, when it finally found a permanent home. It kick-in-the-gut affected me, despite its lavishness, its kitsch, its didacticism, its weight, its moralization, its clichés,  its new-ageism, its self-conscious research apparatus. It read history through the body rather than the (patri)archive. It worked. I bought the book. I worked it into my classes. I went to her shop in Belen, New Mexico and bought the video. Her assistant even showed me into part of her house - she said Judy would probably have invited me in had she been there. I won't reproduce what the article - which is substantial -  says about her work, and The Dinner Party especially, which if you don't know you must check out, and really, get on a plane to Brooklyn and see, it's so visceral. But do try and see the small parts of her very considerable oeuvre that are being shown in London and Liverpool over the next couple of months. You won't regret it. Not many artists set out to make history and succeed.

Article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/nov/04/judy-chicago-art-feminism-britain

Dinner Party Site:

http://throughtheflower.org/page.php?p=10&n=2

Thanks (or is it a hat-tip? what's the difference between that and a shout-out?) to Lynne Baxter for alerting me to this.