To celebrate Chicago’s 82nd birthday, let’s take a look at her ever relevant work, The Dinner Party.

Cover photo: The Dinner Party, 1974–79, ceramic, porcelain, textile, by Judy Chicago, at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, United States (2019). Photo by DannyWithLove.

Today is the birthday of contemporary American artist Judy Chicago. Born Judith Cohen on July 20th, 1939, in Chicago, Illinois, she is 82 years old. Happy birthday!

Chicago is best known for her seminal work The Dinner Party, completed in 1979, a monumental installation composed of ceramics and tapestries. 39 tables are arranged in an equilateral triangle, 48 feet long on each side. Every one of the place settings are devoted to a notable woman — real or imagined — of history, including the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, novelist Virginia Woolf, and the abolitionist Sojourner Truth.

The decorated plates recall flowers, butterflies, and vulvas. In the center of the tables, there are the names of an additional 999 women inscribed on the Heritage Floor. The Dinner Party required the work of hundreds of women over a five-year period at a reputed cost of $200,000.

Upon entrance to the gallery housing The Dinner Party, visitors are greeted by six woven banners which echo the motifs of the place settings. The room itself is shrouded in darkness, and lit like a hidden chapel, a space of devotion for ignored women.

“The Dinner Party slowly evolved. I began to think about the piece as a reinterpretation of the Last Supper from the point of view of women, who, throughout history, had prepared the meals and set the table,” Chicago explained.

Chicago’s own mother was a former dancer and medical secretary, while her father was a labor organizer who encouraged her to read the workings of Karl Marx. She adopted the name of her birthplace after the death of her first husband in 1963, a symbol of her independence. Her early works focused on color and abstraction, and Chicago later introduced writing into her repertoire.

The Dinner Party first debuted in 1979 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and was viewed by over 90,000 people in just three months. The work went into storage in 1988; over a decade later, the work was acquired in 2002 by Elizabeth Sackler — of the infamous Sackler family which owns OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma — and given a home at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007. Chicago explains, “it needed to be permanently housed, because if it hadn’t been, it would have simply reiterated the story of erasure it recounts.”

Determined to enter the art field, Chicago recalls, “I went to auto-body school, because I wanted to learn to spray paint, and because it seemed another way to prove my “seriousness” to the male art world.” Nevertheless, critics originally rejected The Dinner Party as crafty vulgarity.

In 2007, Slate reviewer Mia Fineman wrote, “I was ready to dismiss Chicago’s project as historically significant kitsch. But when I entered the darkened gallery and began to make my way around the table, I changed my mind… The Dinner Party is, as Chicago intended, a powerful pedagogical tool meant to raise awareness of women’s contributions throughout history. Like a great teacher, she gets her point across by appealing to the senses and the imagination, by entertaining, provoking, and engaging the viewer in a pleasurably interactive learning process.”

Chicago admits The Dinner Party is not a comprehensive creation: “it is not really an adequate representation of feminine history—for that we would require a new world-view, one that acknowledges the history of both the powerful and the powerless peoples of the world.” Responding to criticisms of specific omissions, Chicago notes, “It is important to remember that our research was done before the advent of computers, the Internet, or Google search.”

Still today, The Dinner Party remains one of the most important feminist works in Western history. Writes culture editor Sasha Weiss for The New York Times, “[Chicago] anticipated the very question at the core of the #MeToo movement: What would the world look like if women held power?”