From Brooklyn to Clear Lake

Your last chance to get to The Dinner Party: Feminist power, sexuality &controversy on the menu

"The Dinner Party" can be a little spooky, but it's undeniably powerful.
"The Dinner Party" has been seen by more than a million people.
The first thing that will strike you about "The Dinner Party" is how huge it is.
Judy Chicago
Photo by Jook Leung

Don’t be late for dinner. For Judy Chicago’s iconic installation The Dinner Party, that is.

Chicago’s ground-breaking feminist work took the art world by storm in 1979, and a quick trip to Clear Lake will allow you to peruse a selection of test plates and drawings central to the creation of that work. These works are on view in an exhibition called Setting the Table now in its final week on view at University of Houston Clear Lake. An informative website details both Setting the Table and aspects of the original installation of The Dinner Party. The exhibition culminates with a final reception on Saturday from 6-8 p.m. in the Neumann Library, Bayou Building. The Dinner Party itself is in the Brooklyn Museum of Art where it has been part of the permanent collection since 2007.

Of course, this is not the first time The Dinner Party has cast its shadow over the area, thanks to Houston-based feminist curator Mary Ross Taylor. She was instrumental in bringing The Dinner Party to UH-Clear Lake in 1980. Although controversial, The Dinner Party has visited multiple national and international venues and has been witnessed by at least one million people.

But what’s so special, so iconic, or even so feminist about a dinner party? Isn’t a certain vision of the 1950s dinner party with Stepford Wives as hostesses a nightmare from which feminists struggled to awake?

The Dinner Party represents a massive act of revaluation. It is a monumental work composed of a triangular table, each side measuring roughly 48 feet. Each side of the table features 13 place settings, reminiscent of the Last Supper, which notably did not include any women. Each setting is for a woman of historical or mythic importance.

Each setting is composed of napkin, utensil, goblet, cutlery, and plate, with a table runner embroidered with the accomplishments of the 39 featured women. The plates feature butterfly or flower-like sculptures or designs that served as symbols of female power and sexuality. Likewise, the vivid use of traditionally feminine “crafts,” such as embroidery and china painting, was meant to recognize these forms as arts.

At first sight The Dinner Table overwhelms with its sheer magnitude, a feature very intentionally designed to grant to women a heroic scale historically reserved for the accomplishments of men. But if you spend any time considering the detail involved in the creation of this work, scale becomes relevant in a whole new way. The Dinner Party was a non-hierarchically organized collaborative work of more than 400 ceramicists, needleworkers, researchers, and other volunteers.

The project took six years to complete, at a cost of roughly $250,000, which would be over $650,000 in today’s currency.

The 39 women featured are a veritable Who’s Who, from the goddesses of prehistory and Elizabeth I to Georgia O’Keefe. But these aren’t the only honorees. A series of white tiles beneath the tables are covered with the names of 999 other notable women, from Heloise to Gaspara Stampa to Willa Cather. In the quiet of the space around The Dinner Table, you might begin to imagine that you are not alone and that the presences you sense are not other visitors to the exhibition.

The Dinner Party has not been without its detractors. Some modernist-leaning art critics decried the work as propagandistic and even vulgar. And while many feminist artists and art critics have found it intensely moving, others have been quite critical of the limitations of its imagery or even its particular attitudes to the women it celebrates in the imagery of each setting.

While it’s hard to know how you might respond to The Dinner Party, Setting the Table will allow you to get an insider's look at the genesis of a historically critical work of art and the collaborative process by which it came about. The aesthetic value of some works will never be settled, and while opinions on Chicago may vary, the historical importance of The Dinner Party is undeniable, and Houston’s part in that history is all too easily forgotten.

Whether you find The Dinner Party awesome, funny, moving, prophetic, dated, or otherwise, you’re sure to be in good company at Setting the Table.

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Movie Review

Daniel Craig shines in Queer, an unapologetic tale of love and loss

Photo courtesy of A24

Drew Starkey and Daniel Craig in Queer.

As recently as the late 2010s, if a movie was made about an LGBTQ+ character, it was more than likely about their coming out experience. Romance, if it existed, was typically chaste, and actual sex was almost completely out of the question. Things have changed dramatically in the 2020s, to the point that a major movie star has no issue starring in a film called Queer.

Based on the 1985 novella by William S. Burroughs, the film features William Lee (Daniel Craig), whom everyone calls just Lee, a writer living in 1950s-era Mexico City who spends most of his time haunting local bars with friends like fellow writer Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman) and hitting on younger men. His early interactions in the film seem to indicate that Lee has a bad reputation within the local gay community, as multiple people avoid him or give him odd looks.

Lee senses an opportunity when he encounters a newcomer, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). Despite some awkward interactions, the two of them start spending time together, although Lee has much more invested in the relationship than Eugene does. Their hit-and-miss bond continues until Lee, who’s starting to get into drugs in addition to the booze, convinces Eugene to accompany him on a trip to South America.

Directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by Justin Kuritzkes (making their second straight film together after Challengers), early on the film seems to be mostly about the divide between an older person who’s grown comfortable in his ways and a younger person who’s living a relatively carefree life. The introduction of drugs into the plot changes things, though, with Lee searching out more ways to open his eyes to what the world has to offer.

Guadagnino and his team use some interesting visual storytelling techniques to introduce ideas that may not be present in the actual script. The most successful, demonstrated in multiple scenes, is the superimposition of movements by Lee over what’s actually taking place in the scene. The subtle overlay gives the audience insight into Lee’s true feelings, showing what he can’t or won’t say out loud.

Music also plays a big part in how the plot is perceived, with the use of anachronistic songs from Nirvana and Prince serving to heighten certain moments. The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is not as in-your-face as the one they did for Challengers, but it complements the film well, especially when the plot starts to get trippy in its final half hour.

Craig, who appears sweaty and disheveled for much of the film, is about as far from the suaveness of James Bond as you can get in this role. He takes multiple risks with his performance and almost all of them pay off. Starkey’s character is subdued by comparison, but still comes off well. Schwartzman and Lesley Manville are given showy roles, with both using altered appearances that make them nearly unrecognizable to deliver memorable performances.

Queer is not as accessible as Challengers was storytelling-wise, but the fact that it tells a story about gay men living their lives as they see fit with no interference or questions shows how far the film world has come in a short period of time. It also continues Guadagnino’s streak of making audacious films in a way that few other filmmakers are willing or able to approach.

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Queer is now playing in theaters.

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