Setting the Table:

Preparing Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party

30 Year Anniversary Exhibition at the University of Houston-Clear Lake is
published in association with the Alfred R. Neumann Library, UHCL on the
occasion of the exhibition of the same title presented by the Department of
Women’s Studies at UHCL, February 25 – April 30, 2011.

Setting the Table: Preparing Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party is a traveling
exhibition organized by ACA Galleries, New York. Other exhibition sites
include Evansville Musuem in Evansville, Indiana and Tom Thomson Art
Gallery in Ontario, Canada.

This project is supported in part by a grant from the City of Houston

Mayor’s Special Initiative Program of the Houston Arts Alliance, Houston
Endowment, Ben Mieszkuc,Gina T. Rizzo, MD., and Michael and Ann
Wismer-Landolt.

Copyright ©2011 by Jane Chin Davidson

All rights reserved. Published by the Alfred R. Neumann Library, University
of Houston-Clear Lake.

No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced without the written
permission of the publisher.

Editors: Jane Chin Davidson, Alisa Tutt, and Victoria Hoover

Designer: Alisa Tutt

Front cover image

Signing the Dinner Party,2008 lithograph © Judy Chicago,
photography Donald Woodman, courtesy ACA Galleries

Images copyright:
P 6, 7: photograph and article, Houston Post, 1980 © Houston Chronicle
P 3, 9, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 24, 28, 30, 34, 36, 37, 39 Images © Judy Chicago, courtesy
of ACA Galleries, New York, photos: Donald Woodman
P 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62,63, 64, 65 courtesy
of © Judy Chicago 1979
P 15, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 Photos courtesy of © Matthew
Linton 2011
P 42, 43 Photos courtesy of © Margarita Cabrera
P 44 Photos courtesy of © Tutt

Setting the Table: Preparing Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party

30 Year Anniversary Exhibition at the University of Houston-Clear Lake /
Edited by Jane Chin Davidson:
Essays by Jane Chin Davidson and Gretchen Mieszkowski

ISBN 978-1-4507-6160-4

Printed in Houston through Disc Pro Printing and Graphics

 Caroline Herschel test plate (late)

Table of Contents

Page 6
“The Men in the Kitchen of The Dinner Party.”
Houston Post Article by Mimi Crossley
Page 8
“The Art of Dining: Remembering The Dinner Party at University of
Houston-Clear Lake.” Essay by Gretchen Mieszkowski

Page 14
Photographic tour: Preparing Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party at
the Neumann Library, UHCL campus

Page 34
“Commemorating Feminism: The Graphic Symbol and the Sign.”
Essay by Jane Chin Davidson

Page 42
Space in Between project. By Margarita Cabrera.

Page 44
Postface: Egress project. By Tutt and VA

Page 46
1980 gallery guide, The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago,
University of Houston at Clear Lake City, March 9, 1980 – June 1, 1980

Page 66
Checklist of Setting the Table exhibition

3
Gratitude

This project would not have been completed without the support of Judy Chicago and Donald
Woodman as well as Dorian Bergen and Mikaela Sardo Lamarche at ACA Galleries. The list
of names of people to thank is extensive:
Harry Stenvall
William Boatman
Shreerekha Subramanian
Mary Ross Taylor
Karen Wielhorski
Shelly Kelly
Cal Cannon
Margarita Cabrera
Gretchen Mieszkowski
Leo Chan
Johnny Young
Leslye Mize
Christine Kovic
Elizabeth Klett
Sarah Lechago
Maria Curtis
Charlotte Haney
Ma Xiaodong
Kim Case
Gaye Cummins
Nick DeVries
Earlan McChesney
Matthew Linton
Bruce Palmer
Susanne Clark
Leigh Ann Shelfer
Karma Sronce
Angela Howard
Liz Fuhrman Bragg, Evansville Museum
Sysco Corporate
Karen Fiscus
UHCL
Women’s Studies Department, especially students
University Advancement, Elbby Antony, and Andrea Dunn, and Dion McInnis
Staff at the Alfred R. Neumann Library
University Archives
Art and Design Department
All the students who volunteered

This book would not have been completed without the creative diligence of Alisa Tutt.
Preface to the Exhibition

The opportunity to present the exhibition Setting the Table: Preparing It is with great pride that Neumann Library showcases the iconic
Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party organized by ACA Galleries in artwork of Judy Chicago. Providing the setting for this important
New York came at the significant point in time in which the event art exhibition creates a unique opportunity for Neumann Library to
would become the 30 Year Anniversary Exhibition at the University touch our students’ lives and imaginations as an active partner in the
of Houston-Clear Lake. As we look back at the momentous occasion intersection of scholarship, community and learning. Neumann Library
when Judy Chicago opened The Dinner Party on March 9, 1980 at has always sought to advance and enrich our students’ educational
UHCL – the second site where the now famous work was ever put on experience by providing a place where they can come together on
display – the 2011 exhibition of the design drawings, sketches, and levels and in ways they might not in the classroom.
test plates serves to exemplify a process-oriented aesthetic that aligns
with the development of feminist art and women’s studies at large. Karen Wielhorski,
Chicago’s lithograph on the cover of this catalog stating “And She Executive Director, Alfred R. Neumann Library, UHCL
made for them a Sign to See” expresses the graphic arts nature of a
show that commemorates her foresight into our era of communication.
“Setting the table” expresses the metaphor for the historical processes
of feminism in view of the difficulties encountered by women artists
not so long ago, made clear by the fact that only a few institutions
had the gumption to set the stage for Chicago’s monumental artwork.
The relevance of this history brings emphasis on the function of the
location for feminist knowledge, which influenced the curatorial
decision to install the Setting the Table exhibition in the space of
the Neumann Library at UHCL. The library serves as the collective
space for knowledge, and to view Chicago’s process works as archival
objects produces a sense of establishment for the history of feminist
art. Artists today who engage in the subjects of gender, sexuality and
queer come to the discursive table that was set by early feminist artists.
And the inclusion of the video documentation of Margarita Cabrera’s
2010 Space in Between project in the exhibition provides the necessary
update to suggest that feminist art has made a tremendous impact and
continues in many different forms today.

Jane Chin Davidson, UHCL art history professor and
organizer of the 30 Year Anniversary Exhibition at
the University of Houston-Clear Lake

5
7
THE ART OF DINING:
REMEMBERING THE DINNER PARTY AT UNIVERSITY
OF HOUSTON-CLEAR LAKE
BY GRETCHEN MIESZKOWSKI
I WILL NEVER FORGET WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO
SEE THE DINNER PARTY FOR THE FIRST TIME. It had been
installed in a room we used as a theatre-in-the-round in the Develop-
mental Arts building, now renamed the Delta building. Thirty-one
years ago, full of anticipation, in a line of impatient ticket holders, I
entered the corridor leading to the principal display area for the ex-
hibition. Six banners began the work, heralds for the rest and a taste
of what was to come. They were tapestries in assertive red, gold,
white, and black, full of swirling, vibrant forms, at once surpris-
ing and intriguing. Gnomic sayings were woven into them about a
mysterious “She” who would yield a merged world and “Eden Once
again.”
The line moved very slowly, and when I was finally in view
of The Dinner Party table itself, I was stunned by its richness. There
were so many remarkable objects to see and details to take in that I
stared and stared while other eager viewers maneuvered around me.
The banquet table itself was mammoth, in the shape of a triangle:
three equal sides, each forty-eight feet long. Its first layer of drapery
looked like an embroidered silk altar cloth, but that was only the
start. Thirty-nine place settings were positioned on the cloth, thir-
teen on each side of the triangle, complete with gold-edged napkins,
ceramic goblets lined in gold, and ceramic flatware. While these
were undeniably handsome, the amazing objects were the abstract-
art china-painted porcelain plates that represented the thirty-nine
women who were honored guests at the table. Each plate was at
once a work of art—brilliantly colored, often enigmatically shaped-
-and a feminist statement about the woman herself. The plates alone
would have made this an extraordinary experience, but they were
just part of the banquet table. They were positioned on runners,
elaborately embroidered in arresting colors. I had never seen such
lavish, intricate, varied embroidery before. And each runner con-
tinued and complicated the conception of the woman hinted at in its
plate.
The plates and the runners were gorgeous, and I was en-
grossed by them, despite the number of people milling around me,
but when I remember the intensity of that sensual experience of be-
ing cocooned by rich beauty, I realize it came not simply from the
plates and the runners but from the floor as well. The banquet table
stood on The Heritage Floor: 999 white porcelain triangular tiles,
each inscribed in gold luster with the name of a woman. I could
glimpse a little of The Heritage Floor around the outside of the ban-
quet table, but its real impact came from the center of the huge tri-
angle. It filled that center, shimmering like the sea in sunshine, and
its richness drew the three parts of the great banqueting table into a
whole. Ignoring the other jostling viewers, I stood there for what
seemed like a long time, drinking in The Dinner Party, full of pride
to be a faculty member of the University of Houston-Clear Lake.
From March 9 to June 1, 1980, the University of Houston-
Clear Lake exhibited Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. But what
could we possibly have been thinking of? The Dinner Party had
only been exhibited once before, from March to June of the previ-
ous year at the San Francisco Museum of Art. The exhibition had
been greeted by sensational media acclaim and was acknowledged
as a huge feminist success. Nearly 100,000 people lined up to see
it. Some of them waited in line for hours to get in. Newspapers and
magazines all over the country carried features on The Dinner Party
phenomenon. By agreeing to exhibit The Dinner Party, the Univer-
sity of Houston-Clear Lake had thrust itself into a national spotlight.
But this university had only opened its doors in 1974. In 1980 it was
barely six years old.
A SIX-YEAR-OLD UNIVERSITY IS BRAND NEW.
Unlike long-established universities, we had no financial or human
resources to speak of. In 1974 when we gave our first classes, we
did not even have a building. We taught in a concrete facility that
once housed extension courses from the University of Houston’s
central campus; our library consisted of shelves erected in two class-
rooms; and the faculty was relegated to an office building two miles
away where offices that were small to begin with had been cut up
into tiny cubicles for us. In 1975 we moved into the building that
would be the university’s core, but it was only half finished. I had
been hired as one of the first faculty members, an associate professor
of Literature, but by 1980 when The Dinner Party arrived, we were
still worrying about whether Literature, History, Philosophy, and
Art could survive in the science-and-business-oriented environment
of Houston, Texas, this oil-and-gas city next to NASA. And yet we,
the tiny, upstart University of Houston-Clear Lake, and primarily
its Humanities and Human Sciences division, were exhibiting Judy
Chicago’s nationally famous The Dinner Party.
I came to The Dinner Party as a feminist, intrigued at first
and then ultimately seriously impressed by the intricacy, subtlety,
and elaborateness of its feminist imagery. Chicago’s Heritage Floor,
which lies under the triangular banquet table, for instance, incar-
nates visually a point we academic feminists argued again and again
in the 1980’s. How tenuous woman’s hold on her place in history
is! Women appear and disappear in history depending on who is
looking, and under what circumstances and from what point of view
she or he is looking. As light plays on the Floor’s 999 triangular
opalescent porcelain tiles, each tile inscribed with a woman’s name,
the names appear and disappear, depending on the source of light
and— this is critical—depending on your angle of sight. At the
same time, The Heritage Floor makes another feminist statement,
this one about foremothers. That floor is the underpinning for the
banquet table. The thirty-nine honored guests could not have been
the women they were without those other 999 women and their
lives. We owe who we are in part to our sisters and to the women
who have gone before us.
The most arresting feature of The Dinner Party, and the
feature that made it notorious, is the imagery shaped, carved, and
painted into the ceramic plates: clitorises, vulvas, vaginas, eggs, and
breasts. Not every plate or every image is aggressively sexual. One
plate is shaped like a piano. Others evoke a stained glass window,
a warrior’s helmet, flames, flowers, or the corridor of a royal pal-
ace. Several contain suggestions of butterflies. But the majority of
the plates, even when they’re stressing other facets of their concep-
tion, incorporate female sexual imagery. Georgia O’Keeffe, the very
popular American painter of flowers, denies that there’s any such
imagery in her iconic blossoms, swirling around their deep throats,
but Judy Chicago denies nothing at all, and her sexual imagery is
unmistakable as plate after plate opens its dark core.
MANY VIEWERS FOUND THE SEXUAL IMAGERY
OF THE PLATES SO SHOCKING that they were repelled by the
exhibition. Some denounced it as pornography. Others left in a
huff. Art exhibition attendees were undoubtedly more squeamish
thirty years ago than they are today, but I imagine that even now
many people would find The Dinner Party imagery outrageous.
We are accustomed to representations of male genitalia in art. For
centuries, male genitals have been poeticized and idealized. Think
about the phallic imagery of Greek male nude statues where the pe-
nises seem to be resting demurely in beds of curling leaves. These
poeticized penises are not limited to statues of boys; grown men
sport them as well. Greek female nudes, however, are an altogether
different story. There is no indication whatsoever of genitalia on fe-
male Greek nudes. Art historians explain this fact learnedly, but the Fig. 1. Emily Dickinson Plate Line Drawing
fact remains. Judy Chicago’s plates are the female artist’s revenge
for centuries of neglect.
Each carved and painted plate evokes the accomplish-
ments of one of the thirty-nine outstanding women at the banquet
table. Some are mythological figures: the Primordial Goddess, for
instance, and Ishtar and Kali. Some are polemically read historical
figures: Hatshepsut, for instance. I doubt any Egyptologist would
agree to the account Chicago gives of Hatshepsut’s rule as pharaoh.1
Classical, medieval, and Early Modern women appear: thinkers,
sufferers, rulers, writers, and artists. The more recent figures are bet-
ter known to a wider audience: Emily Dickinson, the great Ameri-
can poet (Fig. 1); Anne Hutchinson, driven out of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony for her religious convictions and preaching; Sojourner
Truth, the black feminist abolitionist who renamed herself after
surviving slavery; Susan B. Anthony, who fought for the vote for
women; Ethel Smyth, composer and musician who became a

9
suffragist when her work as an artist was ignored; Margaret Sanger
who fought against the laws prohibiting the dissemination of in-
formation about contraception; Virginia Woolf, one of the greatest
novelists of the early 20th century; and on and on; thirty-nine in all;
each with her own plate.
The Setting the Table exhibition for UHCL’s 30th anni-
versary commemoration documents the process of making these
plates. Art Professor Nick J. de Vries, himself a sculptor, describes
the extreme difficulty of fashioning them. De Vries helped set up
The Dinner Party initially and later talked about the creation of the
plates with Judy Chicago and with others who carved and fired them
with her. Firing such substantial works was particularly precarious
because the amount of clay on various parts of the plates differed so
much. Repeatedly, the finished plates cracked when they were fired
and had to be recreated from scratch, sometimes six, seven, eight, or
nine times. (These are the test plates shown in the Setting the Table
exhibition.)
The thirty-nine clay plates are arrestingly beautiful: sculpt-
ed, fired, and then finally painted in vibrant, assertive colors. The
embroidered runners they are positioned on are nearly equally strik-
ing, and they vie with the plates in complex feminist imagery. Some
of the runner imagery is straightforward. An egg, crescent, breast-
plate, and double axe, for instance, decorate the place mat of the
Amazon, a female warrior according to ancient Greek mythology.
The runner for Sappho, the great Greek lyric poet, depicts a Doric
temple. Her name “rests within a burst of color that stands for the
last burst of unimpeded female creativity,” as Judy Chicago writes
in her book about the plates, The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our
Heritage.2 Other runners use special materials to match the guest’s
life and times. African slaves in America, trying to retain memories
of their homelands, preserved pieces of weaving in their quilts. In
honor of these quilts, Sojourner Truth’s runner is formed from a
pieced quilt that combines strip-woven African patterns with trian-
gular sections of printed fabric.
Women’s century-old constraints as creative artists dictate
even The Dinner Party’s principal media: painted ceramic plates and
elaborately embroidered runners. China painting and embroidery are
women’s overlooked and unappreciated traditional art forms. While
men were creating vast canvases, women were painting plates and
embroidering linen. Furthermore, beautiful as their embroidery of-
ten is, it bears witness to another set of harsher implications. The
runner for Mary Wollstonecraft’s plate depicts her dying in child-
birth in a flood of red blood. Wollstonecraft, the late-18th-century
author of one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy, had ar-
gued for making women “part of the human species” by educating
them. Her runner is decorated in stump work, a very elaborate style
of needlework which produces figures raised up from the original
fabric. Chicago, in her book about the plates, writes about the em-
broidery on Wollstonecraft’s runner (See pages 16-17):
It would be a long time before this vision [for edu-
cating women, for instance] could be actualized.
In the meantime, many women buried their frus-
trations in the needlework with which they filled
their days; they covered their pillowcases with
fine stitching, did needlepoint on all their chairs,
crocheted doilies for their bureaus, and made
lace for the collars and cuffs of their clothes. In
England a craze developed for a technique called
stump work, which involved stuffing tiny figures,
dressing them, and applying them to boxes and
lids. Stump work covers Wollstonecraft’s runner
as a symbol of the “silken fetters” which she pro-
claimed, held women in chains.3
Embroidery, one of the few art forms traditionally open to women,
yields the gorgeous runners of The Dinner Party, but at the same
time it remains a powerful witness to women’s severely restricted
situations over the ages.
Giving dinner parties itself is another of women’s over-
looked and unappreciated traditional art forms. Chicago first
thought “humorously” about her work as woman’s version of da
Vinci’s The Last Supper, reinterpreted “from the point of view of
those who’ve done the cooking throughout history.”4 Her thirteen
guests on each side of her equilateral banquet table would match
Christ and the twelve apostles. But a more direct set of associations
fits much better with china painting and stitchery. Giving dinner
parties, like painting plates and embroidering everything embroider-
able in their houses, had been a primary opportunity for creativity
for middle and upper-class women for centuries. Unlike so much
of life, The Dinner Party was securely in woman’s sphere. Early in
the 20th century, Virginia Woolf, one of Chicago’s 39 dinner guests,
had already identified The Dinner Party as middle-class woman’s
canvas. In a crucial chapter of To the Lighthouse (1927), one of
Woolf’s most important novels, she has her major character give
a dinner party. Her dinner party is this woman’s work of art, and
Woolf implicitly compares it with other characters’ paintings and
poems.
When The Dinner Party opened at the University of Hous-
ton-Clear Lake in March 1980, I recognized immediately what was
motivating Chicago. This work was fueled by rage. Its rage had
been distilled and channeled into complex art, but it remained un-
mistakably rage, and, personally, I knew all too well where it came
from. Judy Chicago and I are the same age. We were raised dur-
ing the same 1950’s white-picket-fence era when the ideal woman
was to find her fulfillment bringing up three to five children in the
suburbs and keeping a decorously arranged, beautifully appointed
home for hubby to come back to after his day at the office. On
weekends, she would give dinner parties. She would invite other
suburban families to elaborate gourmet meals where they would ad-
mire her French recipes, neat children, and gracious living room
before driving away in their station wagons, and all would be well.
One popular advice book warned women, “The family is the center
of your living. If it isn’t, you’ve gone far astray.” This is the life
Adrienne Rich described in her book Of Woman Born: Motherhood
as Experience and Institution (1976), and it smothered everything in
her that made life livable. She was already an accomplished poet, a
Radcliffe graduate who had won major prizes for her work; she had
“that one Talent which is death to hide,” and this white-picket-fence
existence in the suburbs was spiritual death for her.5 This is the life
Sylvia Plath satirized so brilliantly in in her poem “The Bell Jar”
(1963), and her character tries to commit suicide to escape it. If
you did not have the good fortune to be married to a man who could
support you and the family in the suburbs, you could be a teacher, an
office worker, or a nurse. Other professions were effectively closed
to you.
WOMEN WERE AXIOMATICALLY SECOND TO
MEN--THE SECOND SEX, AS SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
CALLED US--SUPPORTIVE, LOVING, ADORNING, BUT NOT
ACCOMPLISHING; HELPING HIM SUCCEED, but never chart-
ing our own courses or putting ourselves first. If a family had both a
boy and a girl, as a matter of course the boy was given the chance for
higher education. Passivity, subservience, dutifulness, willingness
to repress all her own needs for self-expression unless they coin-
cided with the needs of her family, these were the traits of the ideal
woman in the 1950’s, and depression was her characteristic illness.
Gradually, as the 60’s played out, women began to under-
stand the forces that were limiting their lives so stringently, and the
more aware they became, the more they rejected being crushed into
the mold of the ideal 50’s woman. The braless hippies who thumbed
their noses at societal expectations were a dismissible fringe, but
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, was
mainstream. Friedan, a journalist, had lived in the suburbs for
twelve years raising children after being fired as a reporter for being
pregnant with her second child. She had a degree from Smith Col-
lege and she sent out a questionnaire to her fellow Smith graduates
asking them what they thought of their lives. The resulting book
denounced women’s role in American society and the absurd notion
that what made women happy was tending fancy washing machines.
The Feminine Mystique sold three million copies, excerpts were
published in some of the same powerful women’s magazines that
Friedan attacked, and ordinary American women started to ques-
tion their lives and capabilities. In 1966, with Friedan as their chief
organizer, twenty-eight women who had attempted to bring about
change through political means started NOW, the National Orga-
nization for Women, which is still the largest and most influential
women’s rights organization in the U.S. They fought to pass the
ERA, a constitutional amendment that no rights can be abridged be-
cause of gender, and though their attempt failed by three states, their
campaign thrust before the nation the feminist demand that women
no longer be relegated to the second sex.
By the 1970’s when The Dinner Party arrived at UHCL,
feminism was still new, and it frightened many Americans, women
and men both. Its strength was on the east and west coasts, but
even there it conjured up mobs of bra burners who would wreck the
status quo, destroy family life, push religious teachings aside, and
corrupt the middle class. Nevertheless the 60’s had moved the at-
tack against the ideal woman of the 50’s from the fringes of public
discourse to its center, and the more clearly women saw what their
society expected them to be and do, the angrier they became. This
was the powder keg that Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party ignited
in San Francisco in 1979.
THE DINNER PARTY WAS POWERED BY RAGE
AGAINST THE NEGLECT AND SUPPRESSION OF WOMEN’S
CREATIVITY and the relegation of women to the second sex. But
why should this West Coast work of art find itself in the theatre of
a six-year-old university in the South? After all the hullabaloo at
the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the 100,000 people who had
stood in line to see The Dinner Party there, why weren’t other mu-
seums offering to exhibit this work?
Rumor at UHCL had it that museum after museum had de-
clined to exhibit The Dinner Party, including all the major Houston
institutions. Was it the media that curators found off-putting? Were
china painting and embroidery, women’s traditional art forms, too
lowbrow for museums, too kitsch? Or was it the feminism? Were
the strident tone and the in-your-face sexual imagery too far out of
line for the middle of the 1970’s? Or, as some grumbled, was it sim-
ply that curators did not think that The Dinner Party was museum
quality work? The New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer would
later denounce Chicago’s sculpture as “crass and solemn and single-
minded….very bad art… failed art… art so mired in the pieties of a
cause that it quite fails to acquire any independent artistic life of its
11
own” (New York Times, Oct. 17, 1980). Or even, perhaps, was it
the collaborative nature of its production? Judy Chicago was in
charge of every element of the project, and the host of volunteers
who worked with her followed her drawings and mock-ups, but in
fact much of the creating was theirs. Studios full of artists, needle
workers, and weavers helped Chicago fashion the floor tiles, em-
broider the runners, and weave the banners. A team of researchers
provided the information for choosing the 1,038 women honored at
the banquet table and on The Heritage Floor, and they also contri-
buted the historical material for Chicago’s two books on the project.
Like The Dinner Party‘s content, its creation was feminist in that
mutually supportive women, and some men, worked together.6 The
Dinner Party was not the production of the isolated individual cre-
ator of traditional art. Could this approach have been distasteful to
curators? Collaboration on huge projects was to become ordinary in
late 20th-century art, but perhaps in 1980 it could have contributed
to a nervous curator’s reluctance to exhibit this work. For whatever
reason, museums were not opening their doors to The Dinner Party.
Chicago describes herself as having been “devastated by the art-
institutional rejection….”7
Nevertheless, it was still not obvious that Judy Chicago
would be willing to bring her huge piece to a brand new univer-
sity’s theatre-in-the-round. In the end, one man, virtually single-
handedly, made possible its exhibition at UHCL: Calvin Cannon,
the university’s founding dean of Human Sciences and Humanities.
The Dinner Party was the last of a series of art triumphs for Cal. In
the six years the university had been in existence, he had negotiated
three groundbreaking cultural events for the campus. The American
premiere of German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Sirius was
presented in UHCL’s atrium under a barely completed roof (Jan. 13,
14, 15, 20, 21, 1978). In that same atrium, under Cal’s auspices, the
conceptual artist Mel Chin built a monumental waterwheel (“Keep-
ing Still,” Water Wheel, Sept. 5-Nov. 11, 1979). And in the univer-
sity’s new theatre, world renowned director and playwright Robert
Wilson staged the premiere of one of his disconcertingly enigmatic
experimental plays: “I Was Sitting on My Patio. This Guy Ap-
peared. I Thought I was Hallucinating” (January 1978). Then, so
the story goes, Dr. Cannon asked Chancellor Alfred R. Neumann,
the elegant gentleman who founded this university, whether the
Chancellor would be interested in sponsoring a dinner party.
Chancellor Neumann did not merely agree to having The
Dinner Party here; he had high hopes for it. He saw it as adding to
the excellence that was the essential of his vision for this new uni-
versity. The student newspaper quoted him as saying, “The Dinner
Party will do for our university what football does for other schools.
It will put us on the map.” 8 And so The Dinner Party arrived at the
University of Houston-Clear Lake.
FOR US WHO WERE FEMINISTS, THE DINNER PAR-
TY WAS A GLORIOUS EVENT, but this was the South. The new
idea that women were capable of functioning in all areas of life was
gaining ground even here, but the old notion that she should stay at
home and look after the children was far stronger. To many Hous-
tonians, The Dinner Party seemed radical and dangerous, and once
the exhibition opened, their voices demanded to be heard. Letters
to newspaper editors protested it. Some of my neighbors, who were
the Chancellor’s neighbors as well, would not go near it, even when
I promised to smuggle them in without waiting in line. They under-
stood that it was a pornographic work of art. Vaginal imagery? Cli-
toral imagery? They were shocked and offended that such a work
would be exhibited at UHCL, and they had no intention of looking
at it. By June when The Dinner Party left, we faculty were exhaust-
ed. Many of us, especially the art professors, had spent much of the
year raising money for The Dinner Party, publicizing it, writing and
speaking about it, designing posters for it, entertaining visitors, and
helping out when arrangements broke down.
EXHIBITING THE DINNER PARTY WAS A MOMEN-
TOUS ACHIEVEMENT for this six-year-old university, and we
knew it. The exhibition drew more people to UHCL than have ever
attended any event here before or since. Altogether 36,000 people
saw this exhibition of The Dinner Party, people from all over the
South and the West. Its coming was a major occurrence for the
Houston arts community, and they greeted it with great excitement
and supported it personally and financially.
The quite stupendous leap of imagination to envision The
Dinner Party at UHCL was Dr. Cannon’s, and the largest credit
for its coming belongs to him. It must have taken all his charm
and savoir faire to convince Judy Chicago and her advisors that the
UHCL theatre could take the place of a museum gallery. Once his
crucial envisioning and negotiating were behind him, there came
month after month of the everyday work of managing all the details
of such a huge exhibition. For Cannon, The Dinner Party was a
momentous achievement indeed. As Professor Sandria Hu of the
UHCL Art faculty says, he did “a phenomenal job” bringing The
Dinner Party to UHCL.
With The Dinner Party’s ultimate fame and final iconic sta-
tus, time has increased rather than diminished the magnitude of the
achievement of having exhibited it. Thirty years later, Professor de
Vries describes the reaction of his current students when they see
photos of The Dinner Party in art history books: “This was here?”
They cannot believe it. Colleagues from other universities respond
similarly: “Wow! Your university did this?” Radical women’s art
is one of the important developments of 20th and 21st-century art.
With The Dinner Party now housed permanently in its own splendid
gallery in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the
Brooklyn Museum, its stature is secure as one of radical women’s
art’s first triumphs. As the second venue that dared show The Din-
ner Party, the University of Houston-Clear Lake won a place of
honor in the history of both feminist art and feminism.

Gretchen Mieszkowski is Professor Emeritus of Literature/Women’s

Studies at UHCL.

_____________________________________
1
Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (Gar-
den City, NY: Anchor Books, 1979). 63-64.
2
Chicago, Dinner Party: A Symbol. 66.
3
Ibid. 87.
4
Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party (New York: Viking, 1996). 7.
5
John Milton, “When I consider how my light is spent,” in The
Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1998). 256.
6
The Acknowledgement Panels at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center
for Feminist Art’s permanent exhibition of The Dinner Party at the
Brooklyn Museum list 129 creative and administrative team mem-
bers; a final panel adds 295 more individuals and organizations that
contributed significantly. Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist
Art: The Dinner Party website, http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/
eascfa/dinner_party/acknowledgement_panels/index.php.
7
Chicago, The Dinner Party. 213.
8
Quoted by Carolyn Truedell Morgan, “Controversial ‘Dinner Par-
ty’ opens March 8,” UHCLIDIAN, Feb. 26, 1980. Cited in Jona-
than W. Zophy, Building a University: A History of the University
of Houston-Clear Lake 1974 To Present (Houston: Seascape, 2005).
112, note 35.

13
A Photographic tour of:

Setting the Table

Preparing Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party
at the Neumann Library, UHCL campus

Adjacent page top:

Entry into exhibition, hallway of the UHCL library theses stacks
Bottom from left:
Letter Study for Primordial Goddess
Study for Natalie Barney - The Lily
Study for Susan B. Anthony II
15
Detail of Mary Wollstonecraft runner

Detail of Mary Wollstonecraft runner

17
Artemisia Gentileschi plate line drawing

Anne Hutchinson plate line drawing

Interior view from the Special Collections Room

19
Fertile Goddess plate line drawing

Snake Goddess plate line drawing

Ishtar plate line drawing

Kali plate line drawing

21
Long view of the Special Collections Room and
Quiet Room, plate line drawings
23
 Hrosvitha, test plate

Eleanor of Aquitaine, test plate #6

Overhead view of triangular table and test plates

25
Elizabeth Blackwell test plate
Caroline Herschel test plate (late)

27
 Sacajawea, test plate

Study for Illumination III, line drawing

North view of triangular table, Petronilla de Meath test plate

29
 Mary Wollstonecraft test plate #2

Wide view of triangular table, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hrosvitha, and Eleanor of

Aquitaine test plates
31
33
 Fig. 1 Signing The Dinner Party lithograph
COMMEMORATING FEMINISM:
THE GRAPHIC SYMBOL AND THE SIGN
BY JANE CHIN DAVIDSON
BY 2010, the history of the 1980 event-happening of The
Dinner Party at the University of Houston - Clear Lake was a mem-
ory left to folklore. The recounting of the experience at UHCL,
the second exhibition site to debut Judy Chicago’s groundbreaking
feminist artwork, had been recorded primarily as oral history. With
the exception of the program guide republished in this catalog and
a handful of pamphlets and news clippings announcing the March
9 through June 1 show, nothing of documentary precision accounts
for an exhibition that brought over thirty-six thousand people to
visit the university campus to view the work. The visitors who made
the trek included luminaries such as Ann Richards (before she was
elected governor of Texas in 1990), which conveys the impact that
the exhibition originally had on this Texas community.
THE ACTIVISM IN UNITING WOMEN around the cause
of the 1980 exhibition is associated with the sense of solidarity that
marked the feminist movement during that time. As we begin to
understand feminist art historically, the activity of the coalition con-
tinues to be its distinguishing attribute, and The Dinner Party has
played a special role as the emblematic artwork produced through
collective means. No other feminist artwork can compete with the
broad public influence of The Dinner Party, which became a curato-
rial focus for retrospectives as early as 1996 with the exhibition of
Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” in Feminist Art
History at the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum of Art. With The
Dinner Party now, since 2007, permanently on show at the Eliza-
beth A. Sackler Center of Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum,
and with Chicago’s work represented in feminist art retrospective
exhibitions such as in the same year, the WACK! Art and the Femi-
nist Revolution exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Los Angeles, Chicago appears to have established her own place-
setting in the history of feminist art.
AS SUCH, exhibiting Chicago’s Setting the Table on the
occasion of the 30 year anniversary of The Dinner Party at UHCL
presents the opportunity to reconceive the feminist “event.” The ac-
tivities of exhibiting and archiving become practices of recovery
on the one hand and participation in the canonization of the femi-
nist text or art work on the other. Setting the Table, which includes
the collection of preparatory materials, test-plates and drawings for
The Dinner Party, recovers the traces of the efforts made by the
teams working “not only in ceramics and needlework,” as Chicago
describes, “but also in research, graphics, photography, and fabri-
cation.”1 But beyond the collaborative process, the line drawings,
viewed in serialized fashion at the UHCL library exhibition, compel
a reconsideration of Chicago’s “vulval iconography.”2 The ques-
tion of its provocative interpretation is an essential focus of the
exhibition, and reduced here to the black and white sketch of the
flower, Chicago’s signature image exemplifies the double meaning
of the word “graphic.” Read in the primary meaning of the word,
Chicago’s image is often interpreted as “sexually explicit,”
not unlike the reading of the flowers painted by Georgia O’Keefe.
The second meaning refers to graphic design in which ev-
ery graphic image is considered as text, explains W.J.T. Mitchell, “a
coded, intentional, and conventional sign.”3 (Fig.1) In his definition
of images, Mitchell includes the graphic sign, the semiotic logos,
which has its own “graphic” history distinct from whatever signifi-
cance it has in art history. The semiotic distinction becomes more
prominent in the digital era in which Chicago’s works are now under
review, and key to their interpretation as either a symbol or a sign is
the transmission of the object of feminism from its cult status to one
of communication and textual information. The current recognition
of Chicago’s iconic image therefore serves the reevaluation of the
legibility of the historical language of feminist art from the heyday
of the feminist movement. And by juxtaposition, the artworks are
physically situated as textual objects since they are mounted next
to the public stacks in the space of the Neumann Library at UHCL.
Overall, the exhibition represents the historicizing process for femi-
nist art, expressing iconology and canonization, and choosing the
library site for this 30 year commemoration addresses the way in
which the institutions of knowledge have (or have not) been trans-
formed by feminism.
LIBRARIES OPERATE LITERALLY AS CANONIZ-
ING TECHNOLOGY - the function is distinguished by a variety
of practices, beginning with the original liturgical use of the canon
and ending with the current scientific system of the catalogue. In
expressing the latter, the library is about collecting objects for the
most public of archives under the idealism of intellectual freedom.
The logocentrism of this classificatory order in which the ur-text is
maintained alphabetically within the hors-text (Derrida’s “there is
no outside-text”) is similar to the tradition in which the “freedom of
choice in selecting materials is a necessary safeguard to the freedom
to read” as asserted by the Texas Library Association.4 Standing for
the right to obtain knowledge, libraries appear as the perpetual bas-
tion against the iconoclastic in relation to censorship. The feminist
art histories that have emerged since the 1970s are a part of the li-
brary’s vast arrangement of books, one that produces a sense of a
public service that never discriminates amongst authors, subjects,
dates, titles, categories, and cultures. At the same time, the
discriminating reader who visits the library will make choices that
constitute a personal collection that exists within the larger univer-
sity collection. In “Unpacking My Library,” Walter Benjamin dis-
tinguishes his own personal collection of books by its “dialectical
tension between the poles of disorder and order….if there is a coun-
terpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.”5
Thus, the orderliness of the library’s intimate context, coexisting
with its radical public stances, provides a metaphorical frame for
Setting the Table’s “personal” images conceived for the viewing
public.
ON THE OTHER HAND, THE “CANONICAL” IS NEV-
ER FAR removed from its original function in preserving the oeuvre
of the masters, and the site of the library has also been regarded by
feminists as the liturgical space of patriarchal privilege. The canon
in every culture is considered as its intellectual foundation which is
sanctified by the phallogocentrism of the “word.” In the construc-
tion of art history, the genius of artists was consistently written as
an exclusively male potential. The artist Wu Mali, in her 1995/1997
installation entitled Library, acknowledged the overwhelming pa-
triarchal legacy by placing the viewer in a ritual process when en-
tering the library’s sanctified space, suggesting that time-honored
libraries create a reverential experience for visitors. Shown at the
1995 Venice Biennale, Library included Wu’s collection of “pulp
fiction” wherein she took “influential books from the past,” shred-
ded them into tiny bits, and then reconstituted them to fill a set of
acrylic boxes that were made in the shape of books.6 Wu explained
that she selected books such as religious texts that are recognized
as canonical, “but the authority of which has been much disputed,
or works that have become outmoded and no longer influential.”7
The installation has an air of the gruesome, suggests Wu, “because
the Library smelt of the last vestiges of ancient civilisations (sic).”8
She goes on to explain that the site of the library functions to express
the fusing of word and image, “two different media, which implic-
itly describes the possibility of multiple intersections” of ways to
produce meaning.9 Setting the Table at the Neumann Library adopts
the same exhibitionary objective using the library shelves; the fus-
ing of Chicago’s images with the volumes of text deploys the meta-
phor for archiving feminist visual knowledge. However, the display
35
 Fig. 2 Study for Caroline Herschel, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Blackwell & Ethyl Smyth plates
goes further than Wu’s critique in questioning what happens to the
canonical space if we are to acknowledge a feminist epistemology.
INTERPRETED AS THE SYMBOL that counteracts the
patriarchal tradition, Chicago’s feminist icon is now emblematic of
the moment when feminist art establishes a place in the canon of art
history. The relationship between the icon and the canon is based on
the power of the religious symbol in association with the doctrinal
text, and together, they constitute the patriarchal authority of art his-
tory. Traditionally, by conveying the sacred meaning behind the im-
age, iconography establishes the symbolic cult status of the object.
Evidence of the transformation to the canon is found in the art his-
tory survey books – for example, the 2009 edition of Gardner’s Art
Through the Ages, the standard bearer of the art survey franchise,
describes Chicago’s The Dinner Party as “one of the acknowledged
masterpieces of feminist art.”10 As recounted recently by Judith K.
Brodsky and Ferris Olin, prior to the 1970s, the conventional belief
maintained by H.W. Janson, the author of the best-selling art history
textbook, History of Art (1962), was that “a survey necessarily in-
cluded only the high points of Western art and no women artists met
that standard.”11 Chicago’s entry into the survey books exemplifies
a defining change in the tradition that sets the standard for the canon
of art history. Part of the aim of exhibiting Setting the Table in the
space of the original 1980 UHCL location is to question the validity
of the current notion that the institutions of knowledge have been
changed by feminism.
IN THE PAST FEW DECADES, the repetition of Chica-
go’s iconic image (in both art history texts and in feminist surveys)
has established its readability and proposes that the symbol is trans-
formed into a sign. In the Setting the Table exhibition of design pro-
cesses, Chicago’s flower is readable as a “sign” of the body because
the medium of drafted line drawing reduces the image to its simplest
communicable concept (Fig. 2). As explained by Keith Moxey,
“signs themselves carry the interpretations that have already been
placed on them. Our very perception of the sign is conditioned by
the ways in which our culture has taught us to recognize it.”12 The
study of sign systems in relation to the visual arts has been an area of
research that emerged with structuralism in the 1950s and expanded
into the poststructuralist discourse that peaked in the 1990s.
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SYMBOLS AND SIGNS
as it relates to feminist theories of art cannot be clearly tracked in a
seamless discourse. From the mainstream art historical perspective,
Meyer Schapiro studied the function of the sign in relation to the
original religious intent of the iconographic tradition in his book Ap-
proaches to Semiotics (1972). Schapiro’s “semiotic iconography”
can be understood as an approach to the expression of divine mean-
ing as defined by images that rely on a series of associations. The
sign or symbol of the cross, for instance, deploys power from an
“interplay of text, commentary, symbolism and style of representa-
tion.”13 The relationship amongst these different modes of commu-
nication is required in order for the image to convey meaning (and
sacred power). Schapiro acknowledged the force of the traditional
function of the symbol in which Chicago’s icon could be viewed as
a direct response to its established power.
Fig. 3 Letter Study for Primordial Goddess
BY INVOKING A HOST OF GODDESS FIGURES in
her place settings, Chicago contributed to the 1970s feminist de-
bate over the gendered premises of power and divinity in religious
iconography. And looking at the all-encompassing text, commen-
tary, symbolism, and style of the place settings of The Dinner Party,
Chicago presented a stunning contribution that expanded rather
than rejected the divine tradition as outlined in Schapiro’s structural
analysis. Her goddess figures represented a belief-system from pre-
patriarchal society, and as expressed through stitching on the linen
of the runner beneath the first plate of The Dinner Party table, the
spiral symbolizing the Primordial Goddess (Fig. 3) is an image that
is associated to what archaeologists identify as the ancient fertility
symbol. Although Chicago’s re-gendering of the divine image is the
radical point being made, Primordial Goddess should be viewed as
an extension of the conventional use of iconography rather
Fig. 4 Place setting for Primordial Goddess
37
than a radical opposition. Chicago’s expression was made potent
by the longstanding patriarchal structure for deriving meaning from
the religious icon.
BUT THE FEMINIST ICON, distinct from art history/ se-
miotics but of the symbolic order of the psychoanalytic discourse,
engages in an indexical relationship with bodily-oriented feminist
expression. Here, Chicago’s flower is interpreted as the obvious
feminine symbol that counterbalances the domination of the mas-
culine phallus symbol. Feminist theorists in the 1970s-80s looked
to models of signification by acknowledging the symbolic order as
a work of the unconscious rather than as part of a current system of
sacral belief. According to Kaja Silverman, sexual difference func-
tions as an “organizing principle not only of the symbolic order and
its ‘contents’ (signification, discourse, subjectivity), but of the se-
miotic account of those things.”14 Like others, Silverman looked to
both psychoanalysis and semiotics to disclose the way in which “vi-
sion and speech have traditionally been male prerogatives, whereas
women have more frequently figured as the object of that vision and
speech.”15 In other words, although the psychoanalytic theories of
Freud and Lacan assisted in the acknowledgment and disclosure of
the dominating symbol of male power (whereas the feminine “lack”
of power is always already symbolized by the phallic absence), Sil-
verman suggests that the fathers of psychoanalysis are still paternal
figures who perpetuate paternal values.
IN LACAN, the process for the symbolic order is predicat-
ed on the “mirror phase” of childhood in which the caretaker/ speak-
ing subject enables bringing the “self” into being through language.
But as explained by Carolyn Korsmeyer, the symbolic order of lan-
guage is constituted from “the name-of-the-father, the patriarchal
order,” a sphere that lacks completely the maternal influence.16 The
unclear boundaries of the child’s identity (me/not-me/other) entail
awareness of the mother’s “difference.” The Freudian “lack” of the
penis is a metaphorical absence of the female subject overall. Femi-
nists have long criticized the patriarchal premise from which Lacan
rereads the Freudian Oedipal complex. The signification of “lack”
in the symbolic order of language is in reference to the formidable
phallogocentric system of masculine authority as a long-standing
assumption of history. Silverman concludes that in order for
“semiotics to be of any real value to the female subject, she must
somehow interrupt its ‘always-already’ – she must find ways of us-
ing it that permit her to look beyond the nightmare of her history.”17
The usefulness of psychoanalysis and semiotics in empowering the
female subject is ambivalent at best. Still, feminist artists have a
tradition of contributing to a female bodily “presence.” Nothing
illustrates the symbolic order and the visible semiotic sign of the
female body more than Chicago’s flower.
THE SETTING THE TABLE EXHIBITION REVEALS
how contextualization and the passage of time itself permits a per-
spective beyond the patriarchal “nightmare of history.” The typo-
graphical nature of Chicago’s line drawings resonates altogether
differently from conventional symbolic iconography. Viewed in
Peirce’s semiotic theory of the tripartite icon, index and symbol, the
iconic is defined by the social recognizability of the image as given
in everyday secular life. Chicago’s flower is easily recognizable as
an image of the body and the flower metaphor can be interpreted
in its own context. As represented by the pen and ink drawing, the
typographical overlay of the “P” for Primordial Goddess stands out
in a medium that is dramatically spare in comparison to the final
embroidered artwork shown at The Dinner Party (Fig.4). With an
emphasis on the quality of writing, the integration of the letter into
the spiral image points to the linguistic transformation of word and
image. Meaning is read through the letter from the word primordial
which serves as a legible sign of the English language, but compre-
hension is made complete through the visual context of the iconic
spiral.
THE “P” AND THE SPIRAL representing Primordial
Goddess express through a sign system in which the icon is recog-
nizable because of the index of signs that came before it rather than
strictly through the sacred/symbolic function of the icon. The way
in which sign systems work to produce meaning was the focus of the
semiotic research of de Saussure and Peirce, and their combined in-
fluence on art history is nearly always invoked through the example
of Rene Magritte’s 1929 oil painting, The Treachery of Images (This
is Not a Pipe). An exercise in the way in which objects are repre-
sented equally by both words and images, Magritte’s painting of the
pipe, along with the caption written beneath
 Fig. 5 Study for Susan B. Anthony II
“Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” emphasizes the fact that the “real” pipe
is absent. Thereafter, art is considered to appear as simply another
system of visual and literal signs.
THE SHIFT TOWARD THE LITERAL SIGN is exem-
plified by many such examples of word and image relationships
throughout Setting the Table’s exhibition of design drawings. For
instance, the illustration showing the development of the “S” for the
Susan B. Anthony runner back for her place setting integrates the let-
ter “S” to conform with the shape of a woman’s head (Fig.5). Here,
in the medium of pen and ink, the image appears entirely textual in
comparison to the fully illuminated lettering stitched on the cloth
banner. Susan B. Anthony’s original format in The Dinner Party
highlights the importance of cloth, sewing and “domestic” materials
as “women’s work” expression, whereas, in Setting the Table’s me-
dium of drawing, the same work foregrounds the elements of artistic
process and graphic design.
IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DIGITAL REVOLU-
TION, the Baudrillardian sense of image saturation has made it dif-
ficult to maintain stable categories for iconic signification just as
much as theories of gender constitution have disrupted the catego-
ries for the feminine and masculine. Since the late 1990s, the prom-
inent feminist question pertains to Judith Butler’s inquiry into how
gender and sexual differences are social constructions – elaborating
on De Beauvoir’s 1952 pronouncement: “One is not born a woman,
one becomes one.” And during the same time period, the develop-
ment of a computerized daily life of laptops, digital cameras, and
PDAs (personal media assistants) has impacted the way in which
media images are communicated. Historically, the typographical
practice has been distinguished as a commercial non-art production
that is class-distinct from the higher status of the fine arts (in which
Magritte’s painting is categorized). Chicago’s graphic sign cannot
be read outside of the context of the logos
39
and the high/low art discourse, which today involves the way in
which art has moved closer to images that function as information
and entertainment – the two most important purposes for images in
the digital era according to Hans Belting:
A critical iconology today is an urgent need, be-
cause our society is exposed to the power of the
mass media in an unprecedented way. The current
discourse of images suffers from an abundance of
different even contradictory conceptions of what
images are and how they operate. Semiology, to
give one example, does not allow images to exist
beyond the controllable territory of signs, signals,
and communication. Art theory would have other
but equally strong reservations about any image
theory that threatens the old monopoly of art and
its exclusive subject matter.18
INDEED, FEMINIST ART has been the cohesive force in
challenging the regime of the exclusive subject matter; homogeneity
is of course exclusive in gender and “race.” But what position does
feminist art occupy when mass media/communication images are no
longer denigrated by the commodity distinction? The graphic qual-
ity of the Setting the Table exhibition contradicts Belting’s argument
that the graphic sign cannot serve as anything other than a form of
communication – Belting is referring to the convention of the street
sign that cannot serve poetic meaning since it functions foremost to
communicate the enforcement of traffic laws. Still, the ubiquitous
power of the digital image requires a reconsideration of the differ-
ence between the icon and the logos in today’s mass media world.
In the endless proliferation of signs, not even the feminist icon can
be read objectively as singular in meaning. Neither feminist believ-
ers nor masculinist detractors can use the symbol to rally or protest
based on the truth-certainty that Chicago is depicting a vagina or a
flower.
IT IS INTERESTING, HOWEVER, that Belting’s solution
is to argue for a new approach to iconology by recognizing the way
in which images “happen” via the transmission or perception of im-
ages through the body of the artist or of the viewer.19 Belting con-
siders the perceiving body to be the conceptual bridge to past and
present images. His study entitled Bild-Anthropologie is an effort
to reconstrue old conventions that prevent a serious exploration of
such things as mental images that are produced through visual and
virtual digital media. Belting does not, however, invoke the femi-
nist legacy in body-oriented philosophies. There is no question that
Belting’s study of the affect of the sign was influenced by concepts
from feminist performance and body art,
summarized by Amelia Jones as a “phenomenologically inflected
feminist poststructuralism (particularly the works of Maurice Mer-
leau-Ponty as read through Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, and
others) to re-embody the subjects of making and viewing art.”20 The
feminist aim was to change the detached and hierarchical form of
engagement with art. The Cartesian dichotomy of the mind and the
body was integral to the Modernist ideal for a masculine objectivity
in the arts.
JONES HAD ESTABLISHED the theoretical argument
for bodily-oriented artistic practices that functioned in the “shift to
an unveiled, activist artistic body” – the shift that characterized the
1950s-70s era of American civil rights movements. The artistic use
of the body as a social and political “self” served the aim of coali-
tionist activism for equal rights. Feminism was an embodied move-
ment. And this performative aspect of uniting around the feminist
cause was the single-most influential concept for the 1980 exhibition
of the The Dinner Party at UHCL. Chicago wrote about the Hous-
ton experience as the “first grassroots effort”; to bring the artwork
here required a “broad-based coalition, organized and spearheaded
by Mary Ross Taylor, the owner of a feminist bookstore, and Calvin
Cannon, one of the deans of the university.”21 Chicago perceived
that The Dinner Party was an object that could stimulate dialogue
and initiate the kind of gatherings that Mary Ross envisioned for the
Houston community from the perch of her bookstore.
THE “EVENT” EFFECT of that particular moment in
feminist activism, however, cannot be reproduced for the 2010
commemoration of the exhibit. Only in presenting another event
– the performance work of Margarita Cabrera, pertinently through
the medium of video – could something of a reproduction be made
relevant. In Cabrera’s 2010 Space in Between project, the artist
collaborated with women in Mexico who participated in her per-
formance/workshop by sewing and making works of art using bor-
der patrol uniforms. The women artists crossed the Texas border
as laborers with working visas. The legacy of “women’s work” in
feminist art – such as Chicago’s needlework runners for The Din-
ner Party – continues in Space in Between, and the video of the
performance is shown next to the Setting the Table design works in
UHCL’s library exhibition.
BY THE 1990’s, feminists began to focus on the conditions
of the “real” life experience, such as the lives of Cabrera’s labor-
ers, instead of fixating on the underlying masculinist assumptions
of culture (circulating around the libidinal imaginary and the uncon-
scious). The feminist use of the “symbolic” came into a certain de-
cline. As such, it is conceivable to view the reduction of Chicago’s
iconic flower image as no longer a necessary reversal of “lack” un-
der the regime of the patriarchal symbolic. Instead, the line drawing
can simply “communicate” the historical role that the
vagina symbol plays in the Freudian symbolic system while em-
phasizing (self-consciously) the present-day impact of the text – of
language, the subject, and human agency – to the degree that Space 1
Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: A Commemorative Volume Celebrating a Major
in Between carries forth the social and political advocacy on behalf Monument of Twentieth-Century Art (NY: Penguin, 1996). 7.
of “woman” in the context of immigration from Mexico. Viewing 2
Ibid. 6.
Chicago’s work in today’s “seamless web of interpretable objects,”
3
W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: The University of Chi-
cago Press, 1986). 156. Writing in the 1980s, after feminist art emerged as a category,
as another “text” in the virtual library of text and images, would Mitchell was re-interpreting the concept of iconology, based on Panofsky’s definition
seem to be closer to Mitchell’s ideal for a coherence of knowledge. for the intrinsic meaning of the icon (whereas iconography referred to the subject
To this end, it is irrefutable that the icon and canon of feminist texts matter of the image).
and images were essential to something of an epistemological trans-
4
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,
1997). 158. See Texas Library Association website, http://www.txla.org/intellectual-
formation. freedom. Reading “shall be protected against extra-legal, irresponsible attempts by
self-appointed censors to abridge it.”
_______________________________________ 5
Walter Benjamin: “Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” in Il-
I am indebted to Amelia Jones and Emily Cuming for their help and luminations, Engl. trans. (London: Fontana, 1982). 60.
6
Wu Mali, “Artist Statement,” The Journalist, Taipei, no. 478, May 5 1996.
support in this project. 7
Linda Jaivin, “Consuming Texts: The Work of Mali Wu,” N. Paradoxa, no. 5,
November 1997.
Jane Chin Davidson is the Mieszkuc Professor of Women’s Studies 8
Mali, “Artist Statement.”
and Assistant Professor of Art History at UHCL.
9
Germano Celant, ed., 47th International Art Exhibition (Venezia: La Biennale di
Venezia, 1997). 681.
10
Fred S. Kleiner, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: the Western Perspective, 13th ed.
Vol. II (Boston: Wadsworth, 2010). 766.
11
Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin, “Stepping Out of the Beaten Path: Reassessing
the Feminist Art Movement,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol.
33, no. 2, 2008. 329.
12
Keith P. F. Moxey, “Semiotics and the Social History of Art,” New Literary His-
tory, Vol. 22, No. 4, Papers from the Commonwealth Center forLiterary and Cultural
Change (Autumn, 1991). 989.
13
Meyer Schapiro, Approaches to Semiotics: Words and Pictures: On the Literal and
the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (The Hague: Mouton, 1973).17.
14
Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1984). viii.
15
Ibid.
16
Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (NY: Routledge,
2004). 140.
17
Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics. viii.
18
Hans Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology,” Critical
Inquiry 31 (Winter 2005). 303-4.
19
Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology.” 302-3.
20
Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota press 1998)11.
21
Chicago, The Dinner Party: A Commemorative volume Celebrating a Major Mon-
ument of Twentieth-Century Art. 213.

41
Margarita Cabrera

On view with the Setting the Table exhibition in the Neumann Library
UHCL is Margarita Cabrera’s video document of her 2010 performa-
tive artwork.
SPACE IN BETWEEN is a collaborative project in the form of a sewing
and embroidery workshop at Houston’s Box 13 Gallery. The title is in-
spired by the term Nepantla, which in the Nahuatl Aztec Language ref-
erences “the space in the middle” as it relates to marginalized cultures
and their resistance strategies of survival. Gloria Anzaldua, scholar,
activist, and author of Borderlands/La Frontera, views Nepantla as a
reference to living in the borderlands or crossroads, and the process of
creating alternative spaces in which to live, function, or create.
Cabrera’s work continues an ongoing exploration of the defining eco-
nomic relationship between the United States and Mexico. She is inter-
ested in creating an aesthetic platform for political and social-cultural
consciousness as a means of survival.

The project is structured in three parts:

First, given the history of the BOX13 space as a SINGER sewing ma-
chine showroom, sewing school and repair/factory, a community work-
shop will produce numerous sculptural replicas of desert plants that
are indigenous to the Southwestern United States, the most frequently
traveled route of immigration into the U.S. Sewn together out of border
patrol uniforms, and planted in traditional Mexican terra cotta pots,
these sculptural plants render the role of border patrol officers as the
protagonists in the American landscape.
A second focus is the attempt to re-introduce and/or maintain an eth-
nic connection with vital cultural Mexican craft traditions. Members of
migrating communities from Mexico living in the Houston Community
will be invited to work with traditional sewing and embroidery tech-
niques from Los Tenangos, Hidalgo, Mexico. Traditionally in mural
form, the embroidery from Tenango de Doria Hidalgo, employs color-
ful narrative renditions reflecting popular culture, traditional rituals and
myths of the Otomi indigenous communities. Sometimes appropriating
and other times reclaiming these techniques, immigrant workers will
use it to relay their own personal border crossing experience. This em-
broidered narrative element will be combined in creative ways with the
desert plants.
Thirdly, the production areas are divided into four parts consisting of
a cutting area, a sewing area, an embroidery area, and a construction
area.

The work being produced and gradually displayed is primarily made

from Border Patrol uniforms resulting in sculptures that represent
desert plants that embody personal immigrant stories. The workers
sharing in this labor and its rewards (Cabrera is sharing proceeds from
sales with the craftsmen/women) are coming to this project from *The
Houston Interfaith Worker Justice Center.
 Scenes from Space In Between video
Images and written material courtesy of © Margarita Cabrera 2010, www.margaritacabrera.com

43
 Flo, by Tutt

Postface:The Egress Project

By Tutt and VA

I want to impress the idea that the decorative arts have a place in the
digital era based on the remnants and traces of a “woman’s work”
past. The aim is to create a living symbol of the efforts of people who
made “women’s work” as I renew the actions of women who have
left the traces of their washing and ironing done so very long ago. I
begin by making carefully designed patterns that I have adapted from
quilting and dressmaking techniques. The decorative tablecloths and
linens which I have recycled will ultimately be remade into another
decorative piece. The craft of symbols and signs prevail in the old
and new ways. And in these works entitled Snatch and Flo, the
graphic symbols of the feminist art movement are reconstructed and
Snatch, by VA and Tutt redesigned. In the fluidity of writing and imagery that emerged from
theorists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, the trickle spilling
out into the stream constitute the ebb and flow of the tides that have
come and gone in the development of feminism. I view my artis-
tic practice, working to recast old discarded linens, tablecloths and
doilies into cloth sculptures, as the performative means to validate the
feminist art movement of the previous generation.
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Setting the Table exhibition checklist
Signing The Dinner Party
Lithograph, 1/8
24 in. x 24 in. (60.96 cm x 60.96 cm)
© Judy Chicago 2008
Primordial Goddess - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.13 in. (29.21 cm x 35.88 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978
Fertile Goddess - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978
Ishtar - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978
Kali - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1977
Snake Goddess - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1977
Sophia - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978
Amazon - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978
Hatshepsut - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978
Judith - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.13 in. (29.21 cm x 35.88 cm)
© Judy Chicago undated
Sappho - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978
Aspasia - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago undated
Boadaceia - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978
Hypatia - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago
Marcella - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago undated
Saint Bridget - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago undated
Theodora - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978
Hrosvitha - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978
Trotula - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1977
Eleanor of Aquitaine - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978
Hildegarde of Bingen - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1977
Petronilla de Meath - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1977
Christine de Pisan - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1977
Isabella d’Este- Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.63 in. x 14.5 in. (29.53 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1977
Elizabeth R - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978
Artemisia Gentileschi - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1977
Anna van Schurman - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978
Anne Hutchinson - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago undated
Sacajawea - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978
Caroline Herschel - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago undated
Mary Wollstonecraft - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978
Sojourner Truth - Plate Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978
Susan B. Anthony - Plate Line Drawing Eleanor of Aquitaine Test Plate #6 Mary Wollstonecraft - Gridded Runner Drawing
Ink and pen on paper China paint on porcelain Ink and mixed media on vellum
11.5 in. x 14.63 in. (29.21 cm x 37.15 cm) 14 in. diameter x 3 in. depth (35.56 cm x 7.6 cm) 56 in. x 30 in. (142.24 cm x 76.2 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978 © Judy Chicago 1975-78 © Judy Chicago 1975-78

Elizabeth Blackwell - Plate Line Drawing Eleanor of Aquitaine - Gridded Runner Drawing Elizabeth Blackwell Test Plate
Ink and pen on paper Mixed media on graph paper China paint on porcelain
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm) 56 in. x 30 in. (142.24 cm x 76.2 cm) 15 in. diameter x 3.5 in. depth (38.1 cm x 8.9 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978 © Judy Chicago 1979 © Judy Chicago 1975-78

Emily Dickinson - Plate Line Drawing Petronilla de Meath - Illuminated Letter Study Letter Study for Primordial Goddess
Ink and pen on paper Prismacolor on rag paper Pen and ink on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm) 15 in. x 22 in. (38.1 cm x 55.88 cm) 8.5 in. x 11 in. (21.59 cm x 27.94 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978 © Judy Chicago 1977 © Judy Chicago 1978

Ethyl Smyth - Plate Line Drawing Petronilla de Meath Test Plate Notes for Sojourner Truth
Ink and pen on paper China paint on porcelain Pen and ink on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm) 14 in. diameter (35.56 cm) 12 in. x 9 in. (30.48 cm x 22.86 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978 © Judy Chicago 1979 © Judy Chicago 1977

Margaret Sanger - Plate Line Drawing Study for Sacajawea Plate Study for Natalie Barney – The Lily
Ink and pen on paper Ink, gouache, and collage on paper Pen and ink on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm) 31.25 in. x 43 in. (79.4 cm x 109.2 cm) 8.5 in. x 11 in. (21.59 cm x 27.94 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978 © Judy Chicago 1977 © Judy Chicago 1978

Natalie Barney - Plate Line Drawing Sacajawea Test Plate Study for Susan B. Anthony II
Ink and pen on paper China paint on porcelain Pen and ink on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm) 14 in. diameter (35.56 cm) 14.5 in. x 11.5 in. (36.83 cm x 28.45 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978 © Judy Chicago 1975-78 © Judy Chicago 1978

Virginia Woolf - Plate Line Drawing Caroline Herschel Test Plate (Late) Study for Illumination III Line Drawing
Ink and pen on paper China paint on porcelain Pen and ink on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm) 13.75 in. diameter x 2.5 in. depth (34.9 cm x 6.4 14.5 in. x 11.5 in. (36.83 cm x 28.45 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978 cm) © Judy Chicago 1977
© Judy Chicago 1975-78
Georgia O’Keeffe - Plate Line Drawing Study for Margaret Sanger Plate
Ink and pen on paper Mary Wollstonecraft Test Plate #2 Ink and mixed media collage on paper
11.5 in. x 14.5 in. (29.21 cm x 36.83 cm) Bisque porcelain 22.5 in. x 34.75 in. (57.2 cm x 88.3 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978 14 in. diameter (35.56 cm) Collection of The Selame Family
© Judy Chicago 1975-78 © Judy Chicago 1974-1977
Hrosvitha Test Plate
China paint on porcelain Study for Caroline Herschel,
14 in. x 14 in. x 2 in. (35.56 cm x 35.56 cm x 5.08 Susan B. Anthony,
cm) Elizabeth Blackwell
© Judy Chicago 1979 & Ethyl Smyth Plates
Ink and collage on paper
Study for Hrosvitha Runner Back 23 in. x 35 in. (58.42 cm x 88.9 cm)
Gouache on paper © Judy Chicago 1979
26 in. x 34 in. x 2 (66 cm x 86.4 cm)
© Judy Chicago 1978

67
Setting the Table exhibition and associated programs at the University of Houston-Clear Lake were made
possible through the generous donations of individuals, foundations, organizations, and the university.
We wish to thank all those who have contributed to the 30th anniversary celebration of Judy Chicago’s
The Dinner Party at UH-Clear Lake through this design process show.
69
 SPONSORS

MICHAEL AND ANN WISMER-LANDOLT

BEN MIESZKUC

GINA T. RIZZO, MD

UHCL, OFFICE OF THE PROVOST

UHCL, SCHOOL OF HUMAN SCIENCES

AND HUMANITIES

UHCL, OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT

DONORS

LYNETTE MASON GREGG

Member, The Association of Business and Professional Women

SALLY JORDAN
Member, The Association of Business and Professional Women

SHARON MAAZ
Member, The Association of Business and Professional Women

71