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She was a leader in feminist art circles, but shed never mounted anything quite like this before.
On nearly every platewas an abstracted, aestheticized vulva.
On white tiles under the tables were the names of 999 more women, written in gold script.
Many critics called it kitsch.
Men were especially vicious.
Most other U.S. museums that had been scheduled to show the work after SFMOMA canceled their plans.
The Dinner Party has cast along shadowover Chicagos life and career.
Herstory, at the New Museum, is the first exhibition to do so in New York.
Born Judith Cohen in 1939, Chicago came up in 1960s Los Angeles, studying art at UCLA.
These experiments were largely rejected by her professors and by dealers from the famous Ferus Gallery as too feminine.
The paintings, psychedelic Rorschach tests, seem to foreshadow the brashness of The Dinner Party.
Ive long been hesitant about that imagery, wondering about the exclusions suggested by its literalness.
It seems, like a pussy hat, to premise womanhood on organs alone.
TheRejection Drawings(1974) contain vulnerable, handwritten confessions.
The projects that followed are not as successful.
Chicagos embrace of a more figurative, populist style also made her work more literal, weighing it down.
I found myself missing the playfulness of the earlier work.
and follow-ups like,Would There Be Violence?
The banners are elegant.
The queries border on inane.
Representing a way of thinking that imagines women to be inherently, magically good, the projectfeels painfully outdated.
Not all of womens work is about womanhood.
Chicago who spent so much of her career pigeonholed should know.
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