The Dinner Party - Judy Chicago's Plates and The Woman of Spheres (ed)

A repost. The Woman of Spheres, a painting of mine.. Here are a few images of the plates from feminist artist Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party. Much more about the artist Judy Chicago can be found on the web -

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/browse.php

The Dinner Party, and we were there feasting on her life,
as in each plate’s sheen they found some of theirs.
This feast, extends through the gallery walls to dreams
sat at different tables – it is Sappho 46 again,
Judy Chicago’s plate for her so fine, who needs food?

It is Sappho 46, where by the tint of each plate
we are known, and transformed by a little light here,
a little dark there, and desire leaps longing to know
the single woman behind the scene. Untouchable. Vanishing...

At night, ‘The Woman of Spheres’, one of the acrylic paintings
living in the dismantled exhibition of 1940’s suitcases,
wanted to know each Judy Chicago plate, walking round,
leaning in to a name she knew, each leaning out to her
beyond the artist’s impression of a female fleur-de-lille
revealing all life story there to see, breathing
the bleeding colours of ideas, untouchable; felt.

7 times she circled, reinventing tradition; the old curators night lamp,
the cellar stockroom stairwell much too dark; the gallery - still,
though still lit; still enough for all the movement found in art,
so when she dreamt of an empty white dinner dish
back in the comfort of her lodgings, and a crumb,
the potential for corruption, glimmering, and recognised
by Sappho’s plate, she would bless the hours since you were gone.

Her exhibition had been ransacked in the Blitz, crushed, replaced,
by The Sky’s Eye, and other complex maps of town and country,
diagrams retrieved explaining everything, pre/post war trauma,
room for portraiture, three standing on a bridge, train tracks
and curves; a bears cave, abstract art’s blue eye in a northern sphere,
a place to rest; themes connected by a red road, a yellow brick road,
impressionistic dabs, 1990’s acrylic leaping tactile from the canvas
stacking story worlds, all eventually replaced
by Installation art exhibitions from the Tate Modern,
name tagged burps, a Turner prize – an Oscar nomination,

and so instead, from the suitcase, she chooses to remember
an open-air Huppa’s four corners, an open-air prayer; a father,
a glass napkin-smashed under foot, a celebration like no other,
a Black Christian blessing Rose gave at the wedding, beautiful Grace,
roots curled around each other, embraced, like Chicago’s plates –

nothing but space could separate one from the other,
and by her plate, she; blessing you 'as often
as the hours have been endless while you were gone'

08

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Endless Hours

thank you, my dear

you came and you did
well to come: I needed
you. You have made

love blaze up in
my breast - bless you!
Bless you as often

as the hours have
been endless to me
while you were gone

Sappho 46