Straight to the Heart: Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, and the Power of Popular Feminism, 1970-2003
FAIN: FB-54645-10
Jane Gerhard
Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, MA 01075-1423)
I am currently at work on a new book project on The Dinner Party for which I seek NEH funding. This controversial piece of art has been at the center of heated debates since its first showing in 1979. With its porcelain painted vagina plates and elaborate needlework, The Dinner Party was the first feminist blockbuster to move pass museum walls to shape more than the history of art. My project examines it as an expression of popular feminism as the activist phase of feminism began to decline, as well as a site of conflict on which the culture wars of the 1990s played out, both in terms of NEA funding of the arts and the growing conservative revolution.