The Legacy of Judy Chicago: Revisiting The Dinner Party

Chicago’s The Dinner Party is an unashamed act of reclamation, transforming the domestic sphere - a realm historically associated with women and often trivialised by patriarchal society - into a powerful space for artistic expression and feminist commentary. By elevating craft forms such as embroidery, needlework, and china painting - traditionally categorised as “women’s art” - to the status of fine art, Chicago challenges the cultural hierarchy that deemed these forms as decorative or inferior. Her use of these mediums was not merely a celebration of the feminine, but also a radical assertion that the labour, creativity, and skill historically confined to domesticity deserved equal footing with the “high” arts dominated by men.

Chicago’s reimagining of the domestic sphere resonates profoundly with the work of feminist artists like Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois, who similarly transformed intimate, domestic, and personal spaces into sites of radical artistic and political expression. Emin’s My Bed (1998), for instance, turns the unmade bed - a quintessentially private and mundane object -into an unfiltered tableau of human vulnerability, heartbreak, and introspection. By placing the messy, lived realities of domestic life into the public gaze of the gallery, Emin elevated the personal and the domestic into universal themes, forcing viewers to confront the emotional labour and invisible struggles often relegated to the private sphere.

Similarly, Bourgeois’ Destruction of the Father (1974) transforms the personal and domestic into a powerful commentary on ingrained power structures and psychological traumas. In this unsettling and visceral installation, Bourgeois constructed a cave-like environment illuminated with red light, centering on a surreal tableau of bodily remains cast from animal parts. The piece evokes a disturbing fantasy of rebellion and vengeance, depicting a familial dinner table turned into a scene of cannibalistic violence against a domineering father figure. Through this theatrical yet deeply personal work, Bourgeois navigated themes of aggression, fear, and catharsis, channeling unconscious anxieties and psychic tensions into tangible forms. Like Chicago’s reclamation of domesticity in The Dinner Party, Bourgeois’ installation reimagines the domestic sphere as a potent space for exploring power dynamics, repression, and emotional labour. By making the intimate and the psychological visible, she challenges traditional boundaries between the personal and the political, asserting the legitimacy of female anger, memory, and experience as central to the language of contemporary art.

Through their works, Chicago, Emin, and Bourgeois dismantle the rigid boundaries between public and private, and between the monumental and the mundane. In doing so, they assert that the personal is not only political but also profoundly artistic. Chicago’s The Dinner Party may have been rooted in the feminist ethos of the 1970s, but its reclamation of the domestic sphere as a space of agency and creativity continues to echo through the work of artists who engage with the intersections of identity, space, and labour. By transforming the domestic into a site of resistance, these artists compel us to rethink whose stories are told, whose labour is valued, and whose spaces are worthy of art and history.

The triangular table at the heart of The Dinner Party is designed to symbolise equality, in contrast to the hierarchical structures that have excluded women from the annals of history. Each of its 39 plates, adorned with vulva-inspired imagery, celebrate the physical and metaphysical essence of womanhood. Chicago’s decision to centre the vulva as a visual motif was intentional, as she explained: “I wanted the vulval image to act as a visual symbol… of what it has meant to be a woman experientially, historically, and philosophically.” This imagery was intended to reclaim the female body from centuries of objectification and shame, while positioning it as a site of power, creativity, and identity.

However, The Dinner Party occupies a complex space in feminist art, celebrated for its audacious celebration of women’s achievements while simultaneously critiqued for its reliance on essentialist imagery. Chicago’s choice to centre the vulva as the defining motif of the installation can be criticised as reducing the multifaceted experiences of being a woman to a singular biological attribute. This not only simplifies womanhood but also risks excluding individuals who do not conform to this narrow anatomical framework, such as transgender women, intersex individuals, and others whose identities challenge binary notions of gender. This critique resonates deeply within contemporary feminist discourse, where intersectionality underscores the necessity of acknowledging how race, class, sexuality, and other factors intersect with gender to shape diverse lived experiences. By tying womanhood so explicitly to anatomy, The Dinner Party risks simplifying and universalising an identity that is far from monolithic, inadvertently reinforcing the exclusions it seeks to challenge.

The place setting dedicated to Sojourner Truth epitomises these tensions. Unlike the vulvar imagery present on the other plates, Truth’s plate features three faces, a choice that has been criticised as a symbolic erasure of Black female sexuality. Hortense J. Spillers argued that this deviation not only effaces Truth’s sexual identity but perpetuates a long history of rendering Black women invisible within feminist narratives dominated by white perspectives. This omission is particularly striking when considering Truth’s own legacy as an independent Black woman and abolitionist who navigated a society deeply entrenched in both racism and sexism. In doing so, The Dinner Party unwittingly mirrors the same systems of exclusion it seeks to challenge, revealing the limitations of its era’s feminist framework. Similarly, Alice Walker lamented the lack of nuanced representation of women of colour in the installation, noting that Chicago’s approach marginalised the specific struggles and contributions of non-white women. Walker’s critique highlights a broader issue within the feminism of the 1970s; a movement that often centered the experiences of middle-class white women while sidelining the voices of others.

However, these critiques do not negate the work’s significance; instead, they can be used to expand the conversation around its legacy. The criticisms of essentialism and the marginalisation of intersectional identities highlight the evolution of feminist thought from the 1970s to today. Contemporary feminism emphasises that gender cannot be disentangled from race, class, or sexuality. As such, while The Dinner Party remains a groundbreaking and important piece of feminist art, it also serves as a reminder of the necessity for inclusivity and nuance in feminist movements and representations.

The Dinner Party should be understood as limited in its feminist scope, rooted in ideas now recognised as outdated and reflective of the 1970s feminist movement from which it emerged. Nonetheless, it remains a watershed moment in feminist art, asserting that women’s stories, experiences, and creative expressions deserve recognition and a place in cultural narratives. Its unapologetic celebration of women’s achievements laid a foundation for future artists to critique and expand on themes of gender, identity, and the body. By elevating traditionally devalued domestic art forms like embroidery and china painting, Chicago transformed the domestic sphere into a site of both creative power and historical significance.