Judy Chicago and the Dinner Party are linked in the imagination the way no artist in recent memory has been coupled with her artwork. Although the Dinner Party continues to tour, it's rapidly becoming a thing of the past for Chicago. When I recently asked her what she might do differently if she had it all to do over again, Chicago replied in typically forthright fashion, "I can't change it now, so why look back? Why speculate?"

When the Dinner Party made its debut at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in March of 1979, it was probably--along with Christo's Running Fence--the most widely publicized art event of the decade. While most critics expressed disdain for the gigantic, triangular tabletop installation of 39 ceramic plate forms and needlework runners intended to commemorate the historical contributions of 39 real and mythological women, the show set attendance records in San Francisco, Houston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Montreal, Cleveland and Toronto. It seems safe to predict that by the time the Dinner Party completes its tour, it will have been seen by close to 1 million people, making it the best attended exhibition of a living artist's work ever. [authorís note: In 2002, The Brooklyn Museum acquired the Dinner Party.]

Since the Dinner Party's premiere, Chicago has moved her base of operations from Southern California to Benicia, a tiny community perched on the Carquinez Straights near Martinez. Working from an elegantly restored, 19th-century warehouse in Benicia's newly gentrified industrial park, Chicago directs the Birth Project. It's a nationwide enterprise designed to provide women (and men) with stitched, quilted and embroidered images of the birth process, an arena of experience singularly neglected in the annals of Western art history.

For Chicago, the Dinner Party provided myriad lessons for organizing the Birth Project--most of them negative. Controversy arose over whether Chicago had properly credited the project's numerous collaborators. Major museums backed out of pending exhibition commitments partly because of adverse critical response. Mounting so large a show presented such financial and logistical problems that the Dinner Party might never have been seen outside the Bay Area if a grassroots effort in Houston had not provided a model for circumventing the museum system. Additionally, Chicago was more than slightly disturbed by the consequence of the blockbuster status accorded to the Dinner Party, which resulted in what she terms "cattle-car viewing conditions."

In order to resolve these problems, the Birth Project has been conceived quite differently from the Dinner Party. The needleworks can be rolled and transported in mailing tubes and installed via the modest miracle of Velcro. Dramatic large-scale exhibitions have not been planned, ensuring an appropriately intimate viewing situation. And while Chicago does not mention it, the Dinner Party's needlework runners received near universal accolades from a mostly hostile press. Because of this constellation of circumstances, an ancient craft medium is being pushed to artistic extremes unprecedented since the demise of the great European tapestry workshops of the 18th century.

In one sense, Chicago is doing for needlework what Peter Voulkos did for clay in the '60s: transforming it from a traditional craft material to a potential art medium. What distinguishes art from craft is imagination. In craftworks, technical virtuosity is too often everything. In artworks--that is, good artworks--technique is put in service of artistic vision. Chicago agrees completely: "I believe in such distinctions," she says. "The problem is that we need more flexible distinctions--not fewer of them."

The Birth Project needleworks themselves range in size from a diminutive 8 x 4 inches to a gargantuan 10 x 20 feet. The range of needlework technique is equally broad, including quilting, embroidery, crocheting, batik, appliquÈ and petit-point. The images embrace numerous mythical as well as biological aspects of birth. The categorical titles--with as many as 20 of 25 designs within each category--point to this diversity: "Creations of the World;" "Birth;" "Crowning;" "Birth Garment" and "Hatching the Universal Egg," to name just a few.

Chicago's colorful and sinuous images suggest nothing so much as Mexican mural painting of the '30s combined with the graphic "line-iness" of stained glass. Although abstracted, forms are always "readable" and compositions tend to radiate outward from the center, a literal and metaphorical characteristic of Chicago's art of the past decade. Given the renaissance of the human figure in contemporary painting, Chicago's formal concerns surprisingly resemble those of the current painting mainstream. Given the medium and the meaning, however, more radical images of the female form are hardly imaginable.

If one were intentionally seeking a feminist artmaking medium--which Chicago says she was not--needlework might be the logical choice. While the low (and lingering) status of clay derives from the once functional character of most ceramic objects, needlework often suffers not only from this bizarre prejudice but also because it is virtually the exclusive domain of women. The meeting of this traditionally female medium with an emerging body of original, feminine imagery and feminist self-consciousness seems uncannily apt. Ultimately, however, the artistic success or failure of the Birth Project depends less on the technical expertise visible in the needlework than on the resonance of the imagery.

While Chicago designs each image she is not a needleworker. She renders drawings and then translates them into lushly colored paintings on mesh to be done in needlepoint or on fabric to be embroidered. The mesh or fabric is sent to a participant somewhere around the country to be transformed into the finished needlework. This far-flung network of workshops emerged after Chicago announced her interest in the birth process as subject matter during a booksigning party in San Francisco in 1979. One thing led to another, including a working relationship with local seamstress-designer Sally Babson, who quilted the first Birth Project needlework, and the plan gathered steam. "I thought," says Chicago, "that after the Dinner Party I'd return to my studio. I was wrong."

Deluged with interest from women across the country, administrative procedures were set in motion. Potential participants apply, are screened and sent sample needlework patterns on which to demonstrate their skills. They then receive a form explaining the obligations and consequences of their participation. (Chicago asks for a commitment of 10 hours per week, promises credit but no ownership of the completed artworks and offers materials if necessary.) After the problems are ironed out, the needlework begins either individually or, in the case of large projects, in groups.

In connection with each work Chicago holds reviews, usually traveling to the participants. She consults with them at length--evaluating proposed modifications to the needlework at hand, counseling, always encouraging collaboration ("If I wanted robots, I'd go to Japan") and teaching. The founder of the country's first Feminist Art Program in 1970 and a descendant of a long line of rabbinical scholars, Chicago is a passionate believer in education. "I'm teaching in a different way now," she says. "What I can teach these women is visual acuity." These women are, according to Chicago, mostly white and middle class. "Who else has the leisure?" she asks. For many of them, such sustained interaction with an accomplished professional is a unique, never-to-be-repeated experience.

The creation of a nationwide feminist network has been a by-product of the Dinner Party and a conscious element in the planning of the Birth Project. The warehouse which houses the Birth Project is the headquarters for Chicago's Through the Flower Corporation, the umbrella organization sponsoring the Birth Project. It also houses a small retail outlet called JC/WIN, the Judy Chicago Word and Image Network.

A joint project of Chicago and Mary Ross Taylor, JC/WIN disseminates and publishes feminist literature and artwork, both by catalog (primarily) and on-the-spot (secondarily). A transplanted Southern businesswoman, Taylor's enthusiasm for JC/WIN suggests both its value and the audience it serves. "This is so exciting to me," she says with a smile. "Because I grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, magazines and Christmas catalogs were like magic carpets. I grew up in the world I feel I'm addressing."

Chicago's burgeoning organizational structure is partly dictated by economics. But it is also a way of acting on her belief that institutions have been essentially created by and for men. When the subject of the Equal Rights Amendment arises she observes that it is "yet another example of resistance to institutionalizing social change and gains." The solution, of course, is to create one's own institutions, whether that means putting the Dinner Party on permanent display or establishing organizations and businesses. Among contemporary artists, only Christo employs similarly independent, outsider strategies.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Birth Project is just how far outside the professional art world it is positioned. Unfortunately for Chicago, that also means it's outside an art-world support system comprised of government, corporate and foundation grants. Chicago is not surprised that she's not a beneficiary of such support. "The art world loves art, but hates artists," she says, "unless you're dead. Then you're less contentious."

Chicago and her art are, of course, nothing if not contentious. Her "real battle," she says, is to break down "the barriers against too much reality [in art]." Too much reality includes not only images of birth, but images of war. In this regard, Chicago considers herself within the tradition of socially oriented artmaking on the order of Francisco Goya's Disasters of War, Henry Moore's London underground drawings and Leon Golub's contemporary paintings of mercenary soldiers. She abandoned a promising career as an abstract painter because she felt that too much meaning was formally "encoded" and "out of public reach. I believe in art and artists," she continues. "And I think that artists have a responsibility to break down that distanceÖthat sense of otherness."

Another kind of distance, the sometimes painful distance Chicago has set between herself and the art world, corresponds to a new and longer view of herself and the world at large. She's changed since the Dinner Party's premiere in 1979. Appearing calmer and more philosophical about a society she confronts with missionary zeal, Chicago confesses that she's happy to be living in Benicia. This should probably come as no surprise considering that Northern California artists--particularly fellow Benecians Robert Arneson and Manuel Neri--have always been pretty much out on their own limbs. "I like it here," she says. "I guess I fit into the Northern California maverick tradition."

Whatever else has changed, Chicago's all-consuming dedication to artmaking remains. If anything, it's been strengthened by the frustrations and demands of the difficult course she's chosen. As she puts it, "I feel resolved now. I can get my artwork out in untraditional ways...but most of all, I just want to work."