Don't give up. It's really important to trust your impulses as an artist no matter what anybody else says.

With my early work I got eviscerated by my male professors, and so you learned to disguise your impulses, as many women have done. And thats definitely changed.

Once I knew that I wanted to be an artist, I had made myself into one. I did not understand that wanting doesn't always lead to action. Many of the women had been raised without the sense that they could mold and shape their own lives, and so, wanting to be an artist (but without the ability to realize their wants) was, for some of them, only an idle fantasy, like wanting to go to the moon.

I feel like I have at least begun to make a contribution, but my most significant concern has to do with whether my actual art will be preserved for future generations or be erased.

Because we are denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of standing upon each other's shoulders and building upon each other's hard earned accomplishments. Instead we are condemned to repeat what others have done before us and thus we continually reinvent the wheel. The goal of The Dinner Party is to break this cycle.

In the beginning, the feminine principle was seen as the fundamental cosmic force. All ancient peoples believed that the world was created by a female Deity... female deities were gradually overshadowed by or incorporated into the attributes of a number of male gods, then eclipsed by the ascendance of the single male deity that dominates the Judeo-Christian tradition.

So women are at the beginning of building a language, and not all women are conscious of it.