Community: Comment: The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago

Thank you for building such a fabulous home for The Dinner Party--it's been homeless for so long that it's refreshing to see it get the fanfare it deserves.

Last Wednesday, 5/6, when spending the day in Brooklyn at Botanical Gardens and then Brooklyn Museum, to my surprise The Dinner Party is part of the permanent collection! Amazing and wonderful and exhibited perfectly. The cell phone tour of the piece is genius....hopefully this type of access to an augmented auditory tour via cell phone will become more common. It's great!

Why aren't the Macdonald sisters represented in this piece? Margaret and Frances Macdonald were two very influential women in art. I love Judy Chicago and The Dinner Party but I think these two names should be added.

I love the exhibit. I think a women should be represent by the vagina. The Vagina symbolized the exit from the womb and the emergence of life. I don't agree with most of the other comments about why wasn't this person added or How come that person was not added. The exhibit for me was not about adding every woman and goddess to the table but more of a reminder of what lives in the spirit and heart of a real woman. The dinner is a representation of what many women do not do in our society today. We look at each other with envy and hate for reasons that don't matter. We as women bear life and nurture children (female and male). This is a gift that should be cherished and women of the ancient should be acknowledge. This exhibit is a reminder of not just the goddess and women honored at the Dinner Party, but of all women famous or not. This is one exhibit that I will remember forever.

I think the exibit was facinating. My class went today and it was felamial. I just wish we got more time to see more artifact.

Thank you for allowing The Dinner Party to be shared with the world. I first saw this important piece in the early 1970's. My mother and I saw it together when she came to visit my young family when we were working at Nasa. My daughter was just 3 years old. My mother and I were pulling in two directions, she toward the "I like Ike" days and me toward "equal pay", MLK, Bobby Kennedy, and my mother was ashamed, at the time, I was a memeber of N.O. W.We saw this amazing work...and we both just "Got IT". We walked out of there, just understanding each other for the first time. She joined me in the fight to start Rape Crisis Centers and made me promise to take my daughter to see it when they were old enough to understand. I was "in storage" when I wanted to do that when they were in their 20's. Now in their 30's, You have been wise enough to give this back to the world. My deep thanks to all of the artist and to your museum for bring this most important piece back to our world. I brough me and my very conservative mother to a united place where we were both blessed to be women.

It is interesting that the vagina here becomes the symbol of the successful woman. Do not many cultures see women as sexual objects, and limit the role of women in society according to this attitude. It's something it seems Playboy Magazine would have cooked up. What if famous men were symbolized by the penis? Let's see--Babe Ruth a baseball bat, Albert Einstein a mushroom cloud, Shakespere a pen, Philip Johnson a hi-rise building, John Lennon a guitar. How would the public accept it?

I was lucky enough to see Ms Chicagos Dinner Party in Winnipeg in the 70's . I was an unliberated woman who was just awakening to my own strengths.. I can vividly remember gasping in awe when I first laid eyes on the new exhibit in town.So many women I had never heard of and here they were laid out in such beauty and color . I was a person who loved giving dinner parties and related to the feeling of community that so many women and Ms Chicago have created with their dinner party. I would have been in my early 30's at the time. I just turned 65 and am almost grownup!!! Thanks ms Chicago for your inspiration and labour of love.

this is a beautiful and very important piece. I have a question though. Did Judy Chicago craft all of the items herself, and if not, how can I find out who her collaborators were?

Hi Holly, hundreds of volunteers helped the core staff of The Dinner Party studio to realize Chicago's vision and you can read more about that on our website at this link: http://tinyurl.com/63bwxc Hope this helps. ~Shelley, Chief of Technology, Brooklyn Museum