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Her Table Is Ready

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"What we're exhibiting is what women are creating," co-curator Maura Reilly said. "It was not our intention to shock." Ah, the curator-as-conduit model.

Back in the room with "The Dinner Party," Chicago was on a mission to educate the young feminist before her.

"Okay, so let's pick a place setting and deconstruct."

I chose Judith, the biblical heroine who seduced and then beheaded the enemy commander Holofernes.

Chicago launched into a history (or "herstory," as she calls it) lesson, starting with the runner, which is inspired by a Yemenite headdress. The Hebrew on the border means "heroine of her people," and the pomegranate seeds engraved on dangling coins represent fertility. There is a sword through the "J" in Judith.

The day before, a reporter from a New York radio show seemed squeamish about "The Dinner Party," Chicago said.

"Well, what about this imagery? These . . . portals?" she quoted him as saying, doing her best frat-boy impression. "I said, 'Yes, that's right. The dinner party is a portal into women's history.' "

"The Dinner Party" takes women's history through the end of World War II, but the most important era it taught me about is the late 1970s. The pride that Chicago has in her "girls," the vastness of the installation and the psychedelic swirls of color gave me an idea of what it must have been like to be a feminist back then. It's a spread-eagle declaration of arrival. And by the time I departed the Brooklyn Museum, it didn't gross me out anymore.

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