The Dinner Party exhibition was the most memorable experience of the class. For most who are not art aficionados, seeing an exhibit in the flesh helps to appreciate and understand the magnitude of an artist’s work which can be hard to enjoy through pictures. The curator of The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago is a feminist artist and art educator. She is well known for her art collaboration pieces about birth and creation images. These images take a look at women’s role in history and culture. Her most well known work, The Dinner Party is a permanent part of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. This magnificent artwork displays and celebrates the accomplishment of women throughout history. It took about 5 years to complete and cost a quarter of a million. It contains 39 place setting and each pays tribute to a historical or mythical female figure such as an artists, goddesses, activists and martyrs. Each place setting is designed to convey each woman’s style and time period. As with many art pieces, The Dinner Party had its share of critics with some saying it lacked depth and was just “Vaginas on plates.” It was however popular with the general public probably due to how captivating piece is.
Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was known for her self-portraits, pain and passion, and bold, vibrant colors. Due to her depiction of Mexican and indigenous culture and for the attention she pays to the female experience and form, Frida Kahlo is largely celebrated in Mexico. Her career as a full-time painter began after an accident she suffered from which left her in a full body cast. She painted to occupy her time since she had mobile limitations for three months after the accident and she had given up her aspiration to study medicine. She often painted self portraits because she felt alone and she was the subject she knew best. Her works often displayed a stark portrayal of pain due to her personal experiences like the effects of having polio as a child, her marriage, miscarriages and numerous operations. Frida painted 55 self-portraits out of her total of 143 paintings which symbolized physical and emotional agony, she claims that she never painted dreams rather she painted her own reality. She can easily be viewed as a Realist artist as she painted her experiences, although some viewed her as a Surrealist as some of her painting may be deemed bizarre by those who did not understand the message she was trying to convey. For instance, her painting The Broken Column shows Frida in pain in a vivid and horrifying way. She is covered in nails and her body is split into half with her spine looking like it is about to crumble. This painting conveys pain but also shows the Frida is able to look it in the eye and triumph over it.
In an amazing career spanning over 70 years, Loïs Mailou Jones fought and overpowered racial and gender bias to become a successful and influential painter, designer, and educator. Jones was raised in Boston by working-class parents who emphasized the importance of education and hard work. She designed textiles for a couple of New York firms after graduating from Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts. In 1928, she moved to North Carolina to take a teaching position at Palmer Memorial Institute. There she founded the art department, coached basketball, taught folk dancing and played the piano for Sunday services. She also trained several notable African American artists such as Elizabeth Catlett and Sylvia Snowden while at Howard University from 1930-1977. Jones’ work was influenced by the time she spent in Paris and Haiti. She appreciated the fact that her race seemed irrelevant to recognition of her work. Her time in Paris helped her introduce tribal African art, which was popular in Parisian galleries at the time, into her canvases. Her marriage to Haitian graphic designer Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noël further influenced her as she liked the bright colors and bold patterns of Haitian art on annual trips to her husband’s home. Paintings such as Ode to Kinshasa and Les Fétiches were inspired by her travel experiences.
Sonia Delaunay was a multi-disciplinary abstract artist and key figure in the Parisian avant-garde. She started the movement in Simultanism alongside her husband. The display of how colors interact in her work helped create a sense of depth and movement. Her career as an abstract artist started in 1911 as she had the idea to make a blanket for her newly born son, composed from bits of different fabrics like those used by Russian peasants. Her work in Simultanism showed how colors looked depending on the colors around them. For instance, grey would appear lighter on a dark background than it would on a light one. Sonia did this with form so as to create rhythm, motion and depth by overlapping patches of lively hue like her painting Prismes electriques.
As one of the most significant and intriguing artists of the twentieth century, Georgia O’Keeffe is known internationally for her bold innovative art. Her paintings of dramatic cityscapes, glowing landscapes, and images of bones against the stark desert sky are significant contributions to American Modernism. Born in 1887, she grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. She then studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York. Under the tutelage of William Merritt Chase, F. Luis Mora, and Kenyon Cox she learned traditional realist painting. After a couple of years she had changed her focus to revolutionism as she had studied the ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow. The works of Georgia O’Keeffe has established itself for almost a century in the United States and abroad. More than 500 examples of her works are in over 100 public collections in Asia, Europe and the Americas. These include A Storm created in 1922 which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Blue #1, 1916, at the Brooklyn Museum and Red Canna created in 1915 being displayed at the Yale University Art Gallery. Significantly, the last place setting at The Dinner Party is that of Georgia O’Keeffe. The plate being the highest symbolizes her freedom and success as a feminist artist which helped influence upcoming feminist artists who viewed her work as pivotal in the movement.
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