The Brooklyn Museum

When I first visited the Brooklyn museum without Professor Cacoilo , I got the chance to explore The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago. I loved how beautiful the piece was and the homage it paid to so many women that made a huge impact on the world. From people like Susan B Anthony, who played a huge part in what is the Women’s rights movement, which gave women the opportunity to fight for the right to vote, to Georgia O’ Keefe, who is considered by some to be the foremother of the feminist art movement and one of the most well-known American painters. Without Professor Cacoilo, I wasn’t able to take in just how important the piece was, and I didn’t have the level of understanding until she explained it to us.

 

At the exhibition, I got the chance to closely observe every place setting Judy Chicago had set out for her Dinner Party installment. Each setting is dedicated to a woman who has played a part in achieving the same rights for women as for men. The installation is set up as a triangle in which each side of the triangle is referred to as a wing. Along each wing is a total of 13 place settings consisting of a table runner, plate, chalice, napkin, and utensils, each uniquely designed to pertain to the certain individual. Wing one begins in Prehistory and chronologically ending in the Roman Empire. Wing two pertains to early Christianity through the reformation. Wing three addresses the American Revolution, Suffragism and the movement toward women’s increased individual creative expression and what better way than to end that wing than with Georgia O’ Keeffe. In total you will find 39 place settings and 999 names inscribed on the floor of the installment that unfortunately were not able to make it onto the main table. If I had to choose two of the place settings that really caught my attention it would have to be Ethel Smyth and Emily Dickinson. Something to keep in mind about each plate is that they all are made to resemble the anatomy of a woman’s vagina. Emily Dickinson is best known for her poetry which defied the nineteenth century expectation that women were to be submissive to their male counterparts. Her plate is a standstill piece surrounded by a sort of fanned out lace. Ethel Smyth is known for her work as a musician as well as speaking up for female musicians and fighting for women’s rights. This one really caught my eye because it didn’t look like the rest. While every other plate was made to look like a vagina, Ethel Smyths plate is made to look like a piano which completely resembles the love Smyth had for music.

Soon after, we were able to finally venture off into the museum and explore for ourselves. Apart form The Dinner Party being one of my favorite installments to look at in The Brooklyn Museum, the European Art had to be another installment that I enjoyed the most. Not only was the art so enticing but the setting it was in alone was absolutely mind boggling. It was just absolutely beautiful. The first time I came to visit the museum, I was lucky enough to witness the hall fully decorated for a wedding. The beautiful decorations did not only make the hall look stunning but it made the pieces so much more interesting to look at.

5 women artists

Women artists like Mickalene Thomas, Cindy Sherman, Judy Chicago, Kara Walker, and Barbara Kruger changed the way people viewed art through the various paintings and artwork they have created. 

Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas is an African American contemporary artist that used non-conformist materials in her artwork such as rhinestones, enamel, and acrylic. Her painting, “A Little Taste Outside of Love” challenges how society objectifies black women. She paints a sexualized african-american woman. In the painting, the woman seems to have been caught in the moment while she’s admiring herself. The rhinestones that she used in this piece symbolizes how beautiful the female body is. 

Mickalene Thomas "A Little Taste Outside of Love" 2007

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman was born in New Jersey and was an influential artist. “Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting.” Sherman took a lot of photographs of herself and it depicted how people viewed women. She used photos of herself to communicate the stereotypical ways that society portrays women. Sherman was known for always taking black and white photographs of herself in different ways. She was her own stylist, hairdresser, model, etc. She did all these props and photographs herself. She took over one hundred and seventy black and photos during her career. All her photos depicted different people with different statuses. 

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1979

Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago was born in Chicago and is an American feminist artist. She also taught art classes at the art institute in Chicago. Chicago was a feminist artist in the 1970s. She created The Dinner Party which was an important icon because of its meaning. “The Dinner Party comprises a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history.” On the dinner table is also engraved the names of 999 women artists who have accomplished different crafts or art. This had been exhibited in many different venues and countries. 

The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago, 1974-79

Kara Walker

Kara Walker kept a journal to document history and how cruel it was. She describes “Americans live, still, in an atmosphere of phantasmagorical genocide—we kill each other with looks, judgments, the fantasies that white is better than black and that blackness is bestial while being somehow more “humane”—read mentally inferior—than whiteness. But what do those colors even mean?”. She talks about how color signifies some type of power. This sphinx piece is called “A Subtlety/the Marvelous Sugar Baby” and it is made of bleached sugar which symbolically represents how sugar is brown when it’s raw. This piece was made in the Domino sugar factory in New York. When people looked at this piece, they had many questions. Walker also made the sphinx with breasts and a vulva. The sphinx shows that she is fatigued but still stands; that she is able to function even after all she’s been through. 

Kara Walker "A Subtlety" 2014

Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger was born in New Jersey and went to university and a design school in New York. She made designs for a magazine she worked for and then developed other artwork. Eventually, she wasn’t very satisfied so she moved to California and published a book. She then continued to make more artwork that depicts her femisit ideas. Kruger’s artwork questioned society and from them objectifying women. This art piece criticizes the male gaze and that the male gaze does not define a woman. Kruger also created artwork that showed how women’s bodies are not just meant for sex and carrying a child. Kruger did not like that women were being objectified and seen as objects so she wanted to make a statement through her work. 

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Gaze Hits
the Side of My Face) 1981

Works Cited

Brooklyn Museum: The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/dinner_party.  Accessed 3 December 2019

The Museum of Modern Art. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1154. Accessed 3 December 2019

Guggenheim. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/barbara-kruger. Accessed 3 December 2019

The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-sugar-sphinx. Accessed 3 December 2019