Young scholars of art history, and fans of performance art alike will be interested to learn that the pioneering performance artist, critic, and feminist scholar Lorraine O’Grady has recently launched a teachable website that showcases both her visual art and extensive writings. O’Grady herself is blogging too! Born in Boston, and educated at Wellesley College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, O’Grady pursued successful careers as a research economist, translator and rock critic for the Village Voice before she began making performance art in 1980, when she performed her most famous persona, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. O’Grady’s writings about race, gender, and miscegenation, have been published and anthologized widely, and are all accessible or able to be downloaded in pdf format on the site, including her influential essay, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” (1992, 1994). Check it all out here.

(Lorraine O’Grady, after performance of Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline at the Feminist Art Institute, NYC. 1981. Courtesy of Lorraine O’Grady.)

The tour is now active, so if you are coming to the exhibition, bring your phone! The tour includes commentary from Judy Chicago, various curators, scholars, educators, and others. Using the system is as easy as dialing a telephone number and then selecting the code that corresponds to The Dinner Party component you wish to hear about. The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago Cell Phone Gallery Guide is free of charge.

All the audio on each of the 39 place settings is also available on our Web site.

If you came to the exhibition this weekend, you probably missed our comment kiosk. It’s easily missed behind a shopping rack in the exhibition’s shop ;(

In the next week or so, we will be fixing this situation, but in the meantime, if you saw the show, we’d like to know what you think! Comments can be made right from our Web site.

Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly, co-curators of the Center’s inaugural exhibition, recorded the introduction to the Global Feminisms audio tour today. This tour, free to our visitors and delivered via cell phone, will feature many of the artists in the exhibition responding to their relationship to feminism.

Cell phone audio has helped us in many ways. One of the nice things about the new production method is that tour stops can be recorded via phone, similar to leaving a standard voice mail message. Since the show consists of work by approximately eighty women artists from around the world, we found this aspect incredibly helpful in producing our tour. We could send questions to many of the artists and ask them to record their answers via phone. We didn’t have to worry about arranging for a studio offsite or asking them to make a special trip to do a recording.

If we can arrange to do the recording onsite, the quality is often more predictable, so we try and take advantage of this when we can. For this session, Maura and Linda also took the opportunity to try out a new shade of MAC Cosmetics lipstick, Plumful.

Shelley Bernstein
Manager of Information Systems

Judy Chicago dropped by to record the introduction.

Susan Zeller, the Brooklyn Museum’s Assistant Curator for the Arts of the Americas, recorded the piece for the Sacajawea place setting.

Radiah Harper, Vice Director for Education, recorded one of Sojourner Truth’s most famous speeches “Ain’t I a Woman.”

Bob Nardi, our resident sound wizard, set us up and watched over the recordings in progress. Thanks, Bob!

When the Center’s Web component goes live in March, one of the most integral parts will be a virtual tour of The Dinner Party. The virtual tour and panorama are being produced by 360VR Studio, a firm specializing in this type of photography. Jook Leung, 360VR’s founder and photographer, is shown here with his special equipment that will capture this installation. Thanks to Jook’s assistant Peter Barnett for taking this photo of Jook in action.

Jook and the Center’s curator, Maura Reilly, review the first set of photographs that will eventually be stitched together to become the virtual tour.

We are very happy to be working with Jook and his team! You can check out more of his work here.

When the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art opens in March 2007, we will be delivering the Center’s audio guide content via cell phone. Problem is, we don’t get cell service within our building’s very thick walls. By installing several antennas on the roof, we can grab existing outdoor cellular signal and bring it directly into the galleries.

Luckily we get a strong enough signal up here to funnel it inside, so there will be no dropped calls as our visitors listen to The Dinner Party audio tour.

Shelley Bernstein
Manager of Information Systems