“With Open Eyes” (New York: Voyager, 1995) features more than 200 works from the Windy City’s renowned Art Institute of Chicago. This CD-ROM feast for the eyes can be either an interactive learning experience or a passive slide show: Perusing Renoir’s jugglers and Hopper’s nighthawks is an incredibly accessible experience for the discerning expert and unapologetic art neophyte alike.
In 1979, Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (a feminist reinterpretation of The Last Supper) shocked the art world. Her show asserted a simple message: Women deserve a place at history’s table. (The installation consisted of “place settings”–plates transfigured into works of art, representing famous women throughout history.) This spring, Chicago revisits her work with a reinstallation at UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum, opening April 24, and with the publication of The Dinner Party: A Symbol for Our Heritage (New York: Viking, 1996), commemorating the show. Chicago chronicles her own history in her companion book, Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist (New York: Viking, 1996).
Andrea Modica’s Treadwell (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995) contains striking photographs from upstate New York, shot between 1986 and 1995. Although the subjects are not related by time or place, these fragments of isolated rural lives are drawn together by her artistry. Pulitzer Prize-winning author E. Annie Proulx introduces the work: “We may not recognize these faces or these rooms or these ruined patches of landscape, but looking at them is like staring into a mirror.”
