Feminist art gets place of pride in Brooklyn

NEW YORK — From Artemisia Gentileschi, the 17th-century Italian painter, onward over the centuries, women artists have struggled for visibility in a male-dominated world. Even after the American feminist movement of the late 1960s and '70s empowered an unprecedented number of women artists, who elevated personal issues to a political and universal level, they have remained underrepresented in museums around the world .

The Brooklyn Museum has partly redressed that imbalance with its Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, a museum within a museum that opened on March 23. The first public space of its kind, the 8,300 square-foot, or 770 square-meter, exhibition and study center on the Museum's fourth floor will present art created from a feminist perspective and explore its influence on culture and history.

Established through funding from the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation and designed by an award-winning architect, Susan Rodriguez of Polshek Partnership Architects in New York, the center also will provide a permanent home for "The Dinner Party" by Judy Chicago, an ambitious mixed media work that the artist started in 1974 and completed in 1979.

Widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork, "The Dinner Party" was conceived as a symbolic history of women in Western civilization. The monumental installation comprises 39 elaborate place settings, including china plates hand-painted with bold, sensual imagery; ceramic flatware and chalices; and embroidered runners and napkins, arranged along a massive triangular table.

Hatshepsut, the first female pharaoh; Hildegarde of Bingen; Eleanor of Aquitaine; Susan B. Anthony; Virginia Woolf and Georgia O'Keeffe are among the imagined guests, who include both mythical and historic figures from pre-history to modern times.

The names of 999 additional notable women are inscribed in gold script on white luster-glazed triangular tiles that form the floor of the installation.