The Dinner Party

I’ve written about my mother Jessie before and some of the things she’s told me – among them how to approach difficult tasks,  and how to rectify mistakes made – and I try to heed her words.   (See  My Game Mother, Elbow Grease   and Art Imitates Life)

Jessie was a high school art teacher,   and she painted in both oil and water color.   Not interested in selling her work,  she never exhibited,  but gave her paintings to friends and family,  many whom sat for her,  portraiture being a favorite genre.  (See Still Life)

She was also an avid museum-goer with eclectic taste in art,  and we went to many memorable art exhibits together.   One was Judy Chicago’s multi-media installation The Dinner Party that first opened in San Francisco in 1979 and a year later came to New York’s Brooklyn Museum where Jessie and I saw it.

My mother greatly admired Judy Chicago,  the contemporary American artist,  who is now still active in her 80s.   As you may know The Dinner Party Is considered the first epic feminist work of art.   To create it Chicago built a massive,  48 foot long triangular table with 39 place settings,  each with a dinner plate bearing the name of a prominent woman either from history or myth with designs or symbols denoting the woman’s life and accomplishments –   Sappho,  Queen Elizabeth I,  Sacajawea,  Sojourner Truth,  Susan B Anthony,  Margaret Sanger,  Emily Dickinson,  and Georgia O’Keeffe among them.

Each place setting also boasted ceramic cutlery,  a chalice,  and a richly embroidered napkin,  and throughout the work the artist drew vulva-like images leading some detractors to label the work pornographic.  “Too many vaginas!”  said one.

But of course the artist’s mission in creating The Dinner Party was to celebrate women who for too long had been relegated to the back pages of human history.  Critics hailed it as an important and brilliantly conceived feminist manifesto.

In 2007 The Dinner Party became part of the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection,  and how I would have loved to see it there once again with my mother!   But it wasn’t to be,  several years earlier,  after a brief hospitalization my mother had died.   (See Moonlight Sonata)

During those final heart-wrenching days I wept at her bedside and she chided me.

“Don’t cry,”   she said to me days before she died,    “I’ve had a full and very happy life.” 

That was over 20 years ago,  and those words –  the last my mother told me – comfort me still.

Jessie

–Dana Susan Lehrman 

My first horse auction turned into a lifesaver in a time of painful and life-changing events.
Read More

A church door prize quilt from the 1950s gets a new life in the 1990s.
Read More

The artist in her studio,  Goshen,  CT

Danielle Mailer,  Artist Extraordinaire

I love art but I don’t think of myself as a real collector,  although I do have three Danielle Mailers!

Several years ago we were invited to an auction fundraiser by our friend H.  At the time he was director of Wellspring,  a residential treatment center in Connecticut for teens and young adults with addictions and other mental health issues.    Of course we were delighted to go and were impressed by the testimonies given by young people who’d been helped by the program.

And of course we bid on many of the items being auctioned,  among them a work by a local Connecticut artist named Danielle Mailer.   We went home with her print entitled  Downward Dog,  a representation of a woman in a yoga pose,  but with a lyrical and fanciful touch.  The more I looked at it,  the more I loved Mailer’s bright pallet,  and her expressionistic style.

A year later we went to the same fundraiser and came home with another Mailer print  –  as a local resident the artist is very generous in donating her work to our friend’s center.   That print the artist had entitled The Other Side of Fifty,  which by then I surely was!

And by then we had also seen the wonderfully colorful 186’ X 22’ mural entitled Fish Tales painted by Mailer on a wall facing the Naugatuck River in Torrington,  our Connecticut town.   The artist had been granted funds to create a mural to celebrate the return of many fish species to the once polluted river.

And recently we spent a delightful afternoon visiting  the artist in her studio,  and of course bought another work entitled Bella in the Tree.   Bella is the artist’s daughter we learned,  and although we didn’t meet her,  the red chair she posed in was at the studio.   And of course the black cat in the print made it irresistible to us cat-lovers.

We’re thankful we went to that first auction,  bid on a painting that caught our eye,  eventually bought two more,  and finally met Danielle Mailer,  artist extraordinaire!

– Dana Susan Lehrman