 I'm Laura Flanders. I host a Laura Flanders show on CUNY TV and on various other outlets. You can find us at lauriflanders.com. It is an incredible honor to be with you all here tonight. Are you feeling a little prickle? Little prickle? Little prickle in the skin? A little wobbly feeling underfoot? That's because of all the shattered glass ceilings and broken ground that we are celebrating this evening. Really, we have been in a year of no, haven't we? No to war, no to drilling, no to lots of things I won't get into because this is a nonprofit organization. No to assault, whether it's at Miramax or harassment at Tesla. No to the idea that art is exploitative. Trauma is not entertainment. We've said a lot of no's this year. So how incredible is it to celebrate a year of yes here at the Brooklyn Museum? This has been an amazing celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the only institution in the world with feminist in the title. Never, I think, has there been a more important time, and I'm deadly serious, to celebrate the power of yes, the power of feminist art, of feminist changemaking, of feminist leadership, which is to say leadership that talks about and believes in empathy, in consistency, in the personal is political, who we are is reflected in what we do, how we treat one another is as important as how much we accumulate. Our relationships go multiple directions. Our identities are interdependent and intersectional. We need to stop. We need to think. We need to communicate. We need to create. And this place and this celebration is all about that and about celebrating people who have done that, who are firsts in their field. And in some ways, we hope that they're also lost, but I'll talk about that later. We hope that people don't have to fight as hard as the people we're celebrating tonight had to fight. We are making a new world thanks to the creative, visionary leadership of feminist artists and more. Now, I am thrilled to introduce the person without whom this entire institution wouldn't exist, the founder of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Dr. Elizabeth A. Sackler. Thank you, Laura. Thank you, everybody. Well, Gloria Steinem gave me some advice a number of years ago and she said the best way to start a speech is to get everybody laughing because it opens them up. But Gloria is here tonight, right here. And so I can't, as a result, I cannot use Gloria's fan-fucking-tastic and Judy Chicago's here tonight. So I cannot say, this is great. Here is, welcome to the AP. And that stands for Anne Pasternak. Extravaganza, Wita SCFA, roots of the dinner party opening and a finale gala for our incredible celebration of the year of yes, all wrapped into one. And I thank you Anne for that. I have been asked to tell you the history of the Sackler Center in two minutes. And as we all know, it's not possible. But what I can do and what I shall do is tell you that 10 years ago, I envisioned a center as a living organism to house the dinner party and to have exhibitions in the feminist and herstory galleries and public programs in our forums. And with the incredible partnership that I have had, that we have had within this institution, with the board, with the administration, with the staff, we have had 10 extraordinary years of all things, women, to demand equity, equality, and justice for all people and to halt the erasure of art and address oppression and suppression. Our mantra is equal pay, equal wall space. And if we need the Sackler Center as a beacon, it wasn't obvious to all when it opened. And I think now it is obvious to everybody today. Of course, it wouldn't have been possible without hundreds of people, but I want to give shout outs tonight to some people without whom we wouldn't be here at all. In fact, we just wouldn't be here at all. And the first, of course, is Judy Chicago. The second is Catherine Morris, our Sackler senior curator. And my wonderful Rebecca Taffel, who keeps my head on straight and points me in the right direction. Our 10th anniversary committee and our fifth anniversary committee, the Sackler Center first awards committee, who have been tremendous over so many years, I thank you. And Gloria Steinem, you have been by my side, our side, since the Sackler Center opened, and I thank you for everything that you have given us, done for us, and I love you. We've had 29 Sackler Center first awardees as of this evening, and I'm saving the last, as my youngest grandson would, for the rest. And we really wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for Arnold Lieman. And I hope, Arnold, that you are here. Are you here? You're supposed to be here. Where are you? Arnold, you've got to stand up and yes, please, without Arnold Lieman, there would not be an Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. I have often said that if you have an Arnold Lieman in your life, you don't need a lover, you don't need a husband, you don't need a man, you don't need anything, you just need an Arnold Lieman. Arnold, thank you, thank you. And to all of you, to everyone who is here tonight, you have supported, you have loved the Sackler Center, and it is for you that the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center exists, and without you, though, it really is a but without you, it would only be in half, and you make us whole. So I thank you dearly from the bottom of my heart for your support, for being here, for your enthusiasm, for all of the energy that you continue to feed into the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. I thank you very much. So now please join me in welcoming the fabulous Judy Chicago and the fabulous Anne Pasternak. Thank you, Elizabeth, and thank you, Laura, and I just want to say Judy before I sit down because I have to imitate your body language a little bit for a second. So I remember the first time I met Judy, who is just actually, believe it or not, a little over a year ago, when I came out to visit her in New Mexico to talk to her about this idea of maybe we could do an exhibition about the process, all the work and the collaboration that went into the dinner party, and I drive out to, where's it, Belen? Belen in New Mexico, in the middle of, you know, I'm a city girl, nowhere, and I ring on the doorbell, and you know, the only other thing that I noticed on your block other than your house, which used to be a Western hotel, was a bowling alley, and that was now defunct, right? So I'm in the right place, I ring on the doorbell, and there, Donald, her husband, wonderful husband. Yeah, well, okay. He opens the door with his shock of blonde hair and his bright red glasses, and there I look up at the top of the steps, and there's Judy, with her shock of pink hair, and her neon tie-dye leggings, and your bright tie-dye, something like that. Bright pink shirt, and she's like this, I'm not a small person, right? So I'm like, go marching up the steps, and she sits me down in the kitchen, and she says, I know about you. And then I laughed, and I knew that we were gonna be friends immediately. So Judy, when Amanda had to cancel, I selfishly was, yes, I get to be on stage talking to Judy Chicago, one of my great heroes and heroines, and here's the woman who coined the term feminist art, who made the dinner party, who started the first feminist art programs, and what a joy it is to be on stage with you. So the moral of the story, and I'm gonna shut up in a second, is dreams do come true. Thank you, Judy. Thank you for having me. I just wanna say I'm glad Amanda canceled. So, I am too. So, Judy, you know me, I'd like to start from the beginning. Talk to us a bit about growing up and how you became an artist. I was born into a radical family. My parents were political activists. My father was a Marxist. It was in the middle of McCarthyism, so that kind of prepared me for the fact that history goes forward and then it goes backwards. And I started drawing when I was three. I started going to art school when I was five. I always wanted to be an artist, and I was very fortunate that I was, for my generation, I was really fathered. My father worked nights, and so he was there when I woke up for my naps, and he trained me in logic. He trained me in, he used to play this game with me. We had a nursemaid named Ority Blue, who was African-American, and he used to play this game with me. We're walking down the street, and we see Ority Blue, and then we see Norman Brown, and then we see Annie Green. And what he was teaching me was that people's value and their color had no, you know, they were not. Anyway, he also taught me that I had an obligation to try and make a contribution, so that's how I grew up. And just as an aside, I read recently that you have 23 generations of rabbis in your family, so I think that makes your family like the original Jews. Except my father broke away, and in fact, he became a labor organizer. And there's this very famous story in my family about when my father and mother were courting, and my grandmother, of course, was kosher, because my grandfather was a rabbi, although he was already dead. And so my parents used to go every Friday night to dinner at my grandmother's, and one night my mother said to my father, when they left, do you want me to learn to cook kosher? And he said to her, Jewish food makes me sick to my stomach. Oh, he's met my mother. So, art school, so let's go to art school. Well, I went to the Chicago Art Institute from the time I was a little girl, and I was like classically trained, and then I went to California. Oh, the thing I forgot to say is my parents believed in equal rights for women, and that was the good news. The bad news was they never bothered to tell me that the rest of the world didn't exactly share that idea. So when I got to college, I began, I majored in art, painting and sculpture, and my minor was philosophy and humanities, and I took a lot of philosophy and humanities classes. And actually, I know that you're gonna ask me about the seeds of the dinner party. I would say actually in college was the first seed because I took a course on the intellectual history of Europe, and in the first class, the professor said he would talk about women's contributions in the last session, and I was a very ambitious young woman, and I waited all semester, and the guy got up at the end, you know, in those days, you know, there were the leather hatches and the pipe because you could still smoke, and he strode back and forth in the front of the room, and he said, women's contributions, they made none. He did not. Yes, he did. And you have to understand in the 50s and 60s that was the prevailing attitudes where women had no history, there had never been a great woman artist, there was no women's studies, there was no support for women, and I came out into the LA art scene of the 60s which was unbelievably inhospitable to women. And I was interviewed recently by a young woman, and I told her that the biggest compliment you could get in the 60s was, if you were a woman artist, was that you painted like a man. Right, that's what Stieglitz had said about George O'Keefe, she draws like a woman, like a man. No, that wasn't true, anyway, but, okay, let's move along. Okay, so we'll move along, and so that was where the seeds of the idea came from, but you did a lot of work before you came up with the dinner party, a lot of public performances and interventions and paintings, so you want to talk about any of that, and that aha moment where you thought the dinner party, was there an aha moment? Well, the thing is, for a long time, this is gonna be a strange segue, but for a long time, as appreciative as I was for all the recognition around the dinner party, for a long time, it blocked out all the rest of my body of art. I've made a huge amount of art, and I, even, you know, people always talk about the dinner party in collaboration, but I started collaborating in the 60s. It was not always easy to get the guys to collaborate, but I tried, I did artists events, I started doing fireworks pieces then, I did some performance things. You know, I was in like Klaus Oldenburg's happening, and I worked on Mark DeSuvaro's Peace Tower, and you know, I was like, I tried to participate in the art scene, but it was really difficult, and I kept coming up against all these obstacles as a woman, and so at the end of the 60s, I decided to start looking back in history, my father was a student of history, to see if any women before me had encountered similar obstacles, and what they had, if so, how they had overcome them. Well, the first thing I discovered, first of all, I was already starting to travel around, lecturing about my work and stuff like that, and wherever I'd go, I'd go to use bookstores, and I was looking for books about women, by women, and they were, there were tons of them, and they were always a dollar, because nobody was interested in them, so I was putting together this library, and I discovered that what my professor had said was not true, and then I got like really pissed off, and also, by the way, that's not what you wanna have, trust me, but the thing is that anger, anger can fuel creativity, and in my case, it did, it impelled me. I think a lot of artists feel that way right now. Oh, that's interesting, yeah, maybe, yeah, so, anyway, I can understand why, but anyway, so, you know, I was actually talking about this the other day to someone, oh, to Jeffrey Deitch, about, because he's really interested in Southern California and the 60s and 70s, and he's moving back there, opening up again, and I was talking about the fact that even though the scene was so inhospitable to women, and so macho, you know, it wasn't like New York, there wasn't much of an art scene, artists were very oriented differently, it wasn't like making it in the art world, I didn't even know about the art market. I mean, like when I was in the primary structure show, I didn't know you're supposed to get on an airplane and fly to New York when you're in a big New York show, I mean, I was so idealistic, and it fit in the atmosphere of Southern California where there was this incredible spirit of self-invention, because I was saying to Jeffrey, I mean, imagine, I'm like a young woman artist, and I'm like, I'm gonna invent a feminist art practice, I'm gonna invent a new kind of education, feminist art education, I mean, imagine that, I mean, it could only have happened in the atmosphere of Southern California. So I was on the path already of getting rid of male drag because you know, I tried to do my best to paint like a man, didn't work, not, didn't work. In fact- Wait, what are your paintings that were like men's? Well, you know, I moved away from my own natural biomorphic forms, I moved away from color, my painting teachers at UCLA hated my sense of color, they hated my imagery, you know, I wouldn't even got my masters if I hadn't like moved away from it, but you know, I'm just like, I just wasn't comfortable, and I decided I didn't understand what a radical move I was about to make when I went to Fresno, but by the time I went to Fresno and started the program, I was already deep into discovering all this history, and then I started making these paintings when I came back and went to Cal Arts, we did Woman House, I was working on these- Will you tell them what Woman House is? Yeah, yeah, okay. I was working, yeah, just let me finish my sentence. Okay, how many people, now the people here don't know Woman House, and raise your hand if you don't know it, okay, fine, I'll tell you. Okay. I was making these paintings, some of them which are up in the gallery, the great ladies paintings, and I wasn't happy with, I was trying to use my abstract form language to represent the women I was discovering, to honor them, and I was starting to think about wanting to tell this women's history, me and my paintbrush, and but I wasn't happy because I was airbrushing, and even that in terms of my practice of like then I apprenticed myself to China painters, I'd already been to auto body school, I'd already apprenticed myself to fireworks people, I mean it was kind of my practice really, so I decided to learn, I saw this China painting plate, and I decided to learn China painting, one of the things I'm so thrilled about Carmen's show is that she actually addressed something that people have said for years, Judy brought women's crafts over into high art, but nobody really knows what that meant, Carmen's show begins to unpack that and demonstrate it. And by Carmen, I just want to say, Carmen Harmo, who is our curator, she's the assistant curator in the Elizabeth A. Souther Center for Feminist Art, and she curated this exhibition, The Rates. Yeah, okay, okay. I'm just gonna try and complete your question. No, go ahead, I'm sorry, I'll be quiet, go ahead. No, I'm just trying to complete the answer to your question, and then I'll answer about Woman House, although you could probably tell about Woman House. Anyhow, so I had a couple of epiphanies when I was learning China painting. One had to do, I was brought up in university, I went through university art, studio art education. I operated in the elitist art world. I learned how to speak in tongues in terms of making art. And when I was studying China painting, there's in the China painting case, there's a picture of me with a China painter named Rosemary Radmaker. It was at a show in New Orleans, a China painting show that completely blew me away. There were thousands and thousands of people at that show. And I'm like, really? I mean, these people studied with the China painters, they bought their work, they supported them, and obviously it was an aesthetic impulse that was driving them into which they were responding. So, meanwhile, I did a talk at a school in North Dakota, and I was showing my great ladies paintings, and I was explaining what I was discovering about women's history, and afterwards, there were like 200 people in the audience, and I asked them what they thought of my work. That was a big step, like actually ask the audience if they understand what you're doing. But I was in Grand Rapids, so it wasn't quite so risky as doing it in New York. It could be more risky. So, they said, yeah, we think it's really fascinating, but if we looked at your work, we wouldn't understand that. Well, those two things combined, by this time I had decided I was gonna put these portraits of women on plates, but I was gonna hang them on the wall because that's where paintings go. And then I visited this China painter whose family had not eaten in their dining room for 10 years, because she had been busily painting every object in a 12-piece place setting that were presented on the table in a permanent exhibition. And I'm like, plates belong on a table. Now, that's the answer to your question, right? Okay, Woman House was the first female-centered art installation. It was done out of Cal Arts, and it involved our students plus local artists. It was a huge sensation. I will never forget, we used the living room as a performance space. And I wrote this play. It was like a time when issues around housework were like really hot, you know, like who's gonna do the dishes? So, I did this, I wrote this play called The Cockroach Hum Play that all revolved around, oh, you helped me do the dishes? Yep, you know. Anyway, so it was being performed in the living room. And the senior curator at LA County, Maurice Tuckman, was there. Everybody else sit on the floor. So he was sitting on the floor that already was like, what do you mean sit on the floor? Anyway, he was sitting on the floor with his girlfriend Blossom Deary. And as the play is going on, he's getting more and more upset. How do I know? Because he's squeezing her thigh in rhythm to the play. Will you help me do the dishes? Help you do the dishes? Why do I have to do the dishes? Cause you're kind of shaped like a dish. It caused a major sensation. I bet. Womanhouse, not just, no, womanhouse. And even, it has reverberated even to this day. Susan Fisher Sterling is here tonight, the director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And she just flew in from Paris. Thank you, Susan. Where they opened an exhibition called Women House with 34 women artists addressing the themes of womanhouse. That's so great. So you know, you all get the sense, if you didn't know it already, that Judy is a true trailblazer, an absolute radical, fearless radical. Judy, your process also for the creation of the dinner party was quite radical for the day. Will you talk a bit about the process? Well my process seems to still be radical. Maybe even more so now with the pressure, particularly on young artists of the marketplace. Because in the last few interviews I've done with young people, they seem to be just blown away about the fact that for me, making art is a process of discovery. And you know, I start just one of the things I hope this show will demonstrate is my practice, how I go about making art. Because it wasn't just the dinner party, I did this in them and I did it. Like in January I'm having a show in salon 94 of my series, Power Play. Although it's gonna be called Power Play, a prediction because unfortunately, it really does predict a lot of what's going on. It explores the construct of masculinity. Before there was queer theory, before there was gender studies, before there was masculinity studies. And I started the same way I started with the dinner party in the library. And the first thing I discovered when I looked up gender was only books on women came up as if only women had gender. It's like only African Americans have race, right? So I start learning about a subject I'm interested in and then I commit myself to that subject and I go where it takes me. And often it takes me on a very long journey like the dinner party did, like the Holocaust project did that I did with Donald, the birth project did. I mean, for me that's what making art is about is about discovery. And out of that discovery comes art objects. So talk a bit about as you were going through this discovery, how you started to build collaboration. Well I said I'd always been interested in collaboration. There were definitely advantages to collaborating with a lot of women, although there were always men in the dinner party studio. As in fact, I often say that when I decided I practiced myself to the China painters, it was the first time it was a definite advantage to be a woman artist. Can you imagine a male artist sitting at a kitchen table with coffee, of course, and plates and talking about, oh, my children, my life, my husband, my partner, life. Sounds like therapy. No, it wasn't like therapy. It was just a different way of teaching. It was like the personal and the professional were completely intertwined, which was a completely new experience for me. But anyway, I worked alone on the dinner party for a year and a half. Then I decided I wanted the plates to start to rise up as a metaphor for the increasing struggle for freedom and equity. And then they go back down because it was a pushback. Anyway, so I went to UCLA. I found a young ceramics guy named Leonard Skuro. And then I had decided to put the table on the floor. I'm gonna make this floor with these streams of names. And this is important because one of the things I learned is that achievement does not happen in a vacuum. It happens in the context of support. And all the women who achieved at the level of representation on the table grew out of a whole stream of support. And same way with the dinner party, even though it was my idea and my concept, if I hadn't had the support of all these people who came forward, some of whom are here, Diane Gelland, Susan Hill, Kate Amen, Juliet Meyers, Juliet calls them dinner party leftovers, but they all have gone on to very accomplished careers. And I've been fortunate in the fact that I've had support. Mary Ross Taylor, my husband, without support, the best idea doesn't get realized. But anyway, so I saw Diane who had been coming to my opening. She was a graduate student in art history and I decided I wanted to assemble this big number of names for the floor. And I said, hey, Gelland, what are you doing? She said, not much. I said, hey, you wanna help me? I have 300 names. I want 3000. She says, no problem, six weeks. Well, let me see. There was this dinner party joke on Thursday nights because the group got bigger and bigger and everybody would sit around and they'd go, oh yeah, Judy used to think she could do China painting in the morning, needlework in the afternoon, and research at night. Ha ha ha, now what? But it's important to understand the principles by which the dinner party studio was organized. I mean, people used to associate my teaching methods and my collaborative methods with consciousness raising from the 70s. And even though it had a similarity, it wasn't the same because consciousness raising didn't have a goal other than to raise consciousness whereas my collaborations and my teaching had the goal of making art. Like people would say to me, oh, the process is just as important as the product. I'm like, oh, no, glad the process is empowering but without the art, pfft. Well, it was the art but also it was about confronting the erasure of women's history, women in history and expanding the canon. So you achieved both of those things as a result through this artwork and in truth, the art world will never be the same and the world will never be the same. I'm not sure that's quite true. I think that's true. Let me continue for a second which is that this was such an ambitious undertaking and it made so explicit for people around the world the fact that women's history had been utterly erased. And then not only did you put a spotlight on that, you expanded the canon and you made possible a lot of work that's happened since then. And I think it's worth saying, literally millions of people have seen the dinner party around the world. Yeah, millions of people have seen the dinner party, yes. And it's considered to be the iconic work of feminist art. Newsweek called it one of the greatest most iconic works of the 20th century. Let's not underestimate the importance. You can't take an art history class today without studying the dinner party. I appreciate that. However, no, I appreciate that, okay? I know we made a dent, okay? I know that. But you cannot look around the world in which we live today and not recognize that a racer is alive and well. And in fact, I texted both Mary Ross and the dinner party leftovers when I was in the car and I said 37 years ago this fall, the New York art world was trying to kill me and the dinner party. And yes, we overcame that, but the forces of a racer are powerful and it's important to have a long historic view which is what I've had because a lot of people and particularly people who work for change get discouraged because it takes so long. And I learned a huge amount from the stories of the 1038 women on the table. I believe their stories could act to nurture and keep alive the flame of change because for me, learning about Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to be accepted in medical school as a joke, for two years she was never invited to anybody's house for dinner. She was not, women didn't speak to her. Some women spit on her on the street. And for me, I thought if she could do it, I could do it, even though that has required an incredible amount of isolation for me. But I've had two things. I've had a vision of art and art being powerful enough to make change. But in order for art to fulfill its full potential, artists will have to learn not to talk in tongues and to make art about subjects people care about in ways that people understand. I had this incredible conversation with Gloria on the phone yesterday for interview magazine and Gloria posed a question to me that nobody had ever asked me. If I had all the money in the world and geography was not a limit, what would I do? And I said, I would separate art from commerce and I would help artists learn how to make art that could have the kind of impact the dinner party has had because it will take a lot of us to accomplish what you're giving me credit for. Well, and for those of you who are coming to the conference tomorrow, keep that in mind. Judy, we have run out of time and there were so many things we wanted to talk about. For example, the creation of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art Permanent Home to the Dinner Party. But we'll have to do instead is say, Elizabeth, thank you. Thank you. Arnold, thank you. And Judy, I wanna thank you for showing the way, for being so courageous, for being so what we say at the Brooklyn Museum, badass. And for being our dear friend, you inspire us all the time and it is a blessing to lead the museum today that houses the dinner party. It's a constant reminder of the important work we do in having courageous conversations and courageous actions. So thank you very, very much. Judy, stay there for just one second. We are all stoking the flame of change. Here we are stoking the flame of change. Without further ado, I want to, on behalf of everybody here at the Brooklyn Museum, honor you with this year's Women in the Arts Award. To do that, Elizabeth Sackler, return to the stage. I can see the flame of change burning bright, right here, right now. And let's hear it for support and context. When the photographers have finished making their art, thank you so much. As you know, we honor not only Judy tonight, but 11 spectacular women, in fact, more than 11, but more about that in a moment. All of them are leaders in their fields. They have broken barriers in culture, education, politics, civil rights, and so much more. There is one more person who we need to do this work. Don't you think? To join me and Elizabeth, I am honored to be joined by the feminist activist, author, organizer, Gloria Steinem. Right, so where to begin? Well, I feel it's just not right me standing in front of you like this, but it's okay. Okay, it doesn't feel right. Could just be on that end of the table. Why don't you be on that end of the table? Okay, all right. Doesn't that, that feels really good, I have to say. We are gonna introduce, I'm gonna introduce two firsties now who are ground, not just ground breakers, but ground movers in education. And one of them ground mover actually in their literal sense, Deborah Burke. Deborah is not only one of the founders of Deborah Burke Partners, trustee, and VP of the Foreman Institute for Urban Design, founding trustee of New York City's Design Trust for Public Space, trustee of the National Building Museum. But in the late 1980s, she joined the faculty at Yale as an adjunct professor of architecture. And just one year ago, in the 100th year of that school, she became the first woman to lead the University School of Architecture, becoming the dean in July 2016. Appropriately enough because of her mission, she can't be here tonight because she is teaching, Rhoda Kennedy will be receiving the award in Deborah's place. Rhoda, are you here? Yes, here she is. Rhoda Kennedy and Catherine Byrd, in fact, very good. Thank you. Thank you. Our second ground-moving and groundbreaking in education award goes to Ruth Simmons. Ruth became the first African-American president of any Ivy League institution when she became president of Brown University in 2001. If it was 100 years at Yale, we'd have to say it was 350 years in the Ivy League. So congratulations. She was also the first female president of Brown and oversaw the largest fundraising initiative in that university's history to enhance and support the university's academic programs. And this is just important. She established the university's steering committee on slavery and justice to examine and to reveal the university's relationship to slavery in the transatlantic slave trade. Ruth Simmons accepting the award on Ruth's behalf is Paula Ginnings. I really couldn't be happier than I am right now to invite to the stage a woman who has made history of many kinds, including right now, she is actively engaged in making history. She's involved in a struggle that continues and a struggle that demands all of our attention and support. Jodi Archambault Gillette is a hunk-papa and ugala Lakota. She's a lifelong advocate for the rights of tribal nations and their citizens. She's a member of the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota. She was one of the first special assistants to the president of the United States for Native American Affairs and was the first Native American White House liaison with sovereign nations. She is the woman who made sure that Native women were included in the Violence Against Women Act for the first time, bringing those protections to women and children on the res, and she's been dedicated to improving and strengthening relations between the US government and the Native American nations her entire life. She helped advance the protection of Native women and children, as I said, under the Violence Against Women Act and was instrumental, remains instrumental, in the Standing Rock struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Jodi, thank you. All right, so this is the tricky part. In our 12, we have another 12. They together founded a collective that produced a book that certainly changed my life. It's important to have a place to go when you have questions. Our bodies, ourselves, was that place for many of us. When the book was recently reviewed, this is a book that's been translated into 30 languages, more than four million copies have been sold. When the New York Times recently wrote about it, they called it a seminal volume, which showed they really didn't grasp from the basics. Let's welcome all 12 of the original founders to the stage. It's important to have that word said at least once at every award ceremony. I am thrilled now to invite a colleague to the stage, somebody who is another firstie, and in my life was one of the firsties that said, go for it, go and do TV, go and do whatever you wanna do as a journalist, be brave, be determined, fight against the odds. She today hosts Black America on CUNY TV. She was one of the first African American television reporters in the 1970s, and specifically the host of, I think one of television's first ever shows dedicated to Black issues. She is the Emmy award-winning anchor, journalist, writer, producer, so much more. Founding president of the Women's Media Center, currently serves on the board of the African American Medical Research Foundation. No, the African Medical Research Foundation, forgive me, Carol Jenkins. There's a fabulous award that the Women's Media Center gives out every year that is called the Carol Jenkins Visible and Powerful in Media Award. That's the one award you want. All right. Another who is a firstie for making leaps and making change, and well, being a first and getting there first is our next award winner. She, in 1961, at the age of 21, became the first American woman to win a medal in an equestrian competition. She was a member of the U.S. team in two Pam American games, and became, get this, the first licensed female jockey in the United States. After suing successfully in 1968 for being denied a license on the basis of her gender, Kathy Kusner, Kathy, come to the stage. Next up, another mover. Oh, one sort of leaper to another sort of leaper. Our next award winner. Well, if I say revelations, blues, sweet, cry, if I say Alvin Ailey Company, you'll know who I mean, but I have to say, when I think of our next award winner, we have to say this is someone who left an action mark on all of our lives and on the field of not just African American dance, but American dance, the kind of which, the like of which we'll never see again, I don't believe. She both stabilized the company and blew it into the stratosphere. She is, of course, Judith Jamison. She danced not able to attend, unfortunately, because of illness, I like to say because she's getting wet well. She is the first woman to become the female artistic director of the company. That's the first that we are celebrating. We are honoring Judith Jamison. And I suppose, Gloria, you can give the award to yourself to hold for her. No one is accepting it on her behalf, because who could? But we'll just hold it on the table. It'll be happy there. We'll make sure it gets to her. Another person who is not able to be with us tonight, but we hold in particularly close part of our heart, I think, tonight, is our next award winner. I'm just trying to remember the name of the project she was just involved in, and that was Lin-Manuel Miranda's Like a Prayer, the Benefit Song for Hurricane Relief in Puerto Rico. Rita Marino. She is the first Latina and one of only 23 people ever to win an Emmy for her role in the Rockford Files, a Grammy for her role in the Electric Company album, an Oscar for her role as Anita in West Side Story, and a Tony for her role in the Ritz. Rita Marino is a star. Anna Fursey, and we will be making sure that she gets her award. The next honorees, again, come at a very critical time, people who have made all the difference in our lives saying no to the Defense of Marriage Act, and yes, to marriage equality. Our award is going to be given by, let me see if I get this right. We're giving two awards together, they're closely related as you'll see. Roberta Kaplan is currently a founding partner of the law firm Kaplan and Company, an adjunct professor of law at Columbia University. She successfully argued the landmark case, United States v. Windsor, before the Supreme Court, that was the one that ruled that DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, was wrong. The Windsor decision paved the way for the Supreme Court's ruling two years later in Obga Fel, the Hodges, which struck down all remaining state and federal laws against same-sex marriage, thereby making marriage equality a reality. Roberta, please join us on the stage. And then I'm going to invite Gloria to say a few words about our last honoree. Gloria. Every once in a while, a case is one for justice for all of us, by somebody who symbolizes justice. Such is the case of Edie Windsor, long an activist in the movement to free us all from the patriarchal idea that sexual expression is only legal or acceptable when it can end in conception. That's the foe of reproductive freedom as well as of love between two women or two men. And Edie always knew and stood up for us all. She was a pioneer for women in technology. Did you know that at IBM? And she and her partner together lived as a couple for more than 40 years before they could be married in Canada. I must say the absence of marriage made for some very long engagements in those days. And even so, the Defense of Marriage Act in this country excluded them from all the federal benefits available to married heterosexuals. Enter a loving and happy second marriage to the great Judith Case and Windsor who is with us tonight. Not to mention the national LGBT movement after Stonewall and the Supreme Court and Roberta Kaplan and through it all Edie Windsor kind, brave, determined and irrefutably the right human story and the right human being to win the right to love equally and freely for all of us. How many people here knew Edie Windsor? I bet a lot of us, right? And she was the perfect case and the perfect person to win this battle. She left us this year, this very year and she left us with her great partner and wife Judith Windsor to accept this award in her spirit. I thank you because Edie is with us now. We have one last award. Our final honoree this evening was the first African-American woman elected to Congress in 1968. She went on to represent New York's 12th Congressional District for seven terms from 1969 to 83. Without her we wouldn't have seen expansion of the food stamp program and the CHIP program. We wouldn't have seen an office staffed entirely by women, half of them women of color. She worked on the Education and Labor Committee, helped form the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Women's Caucus. She served as the secretary for the Democratic Caucus from 1977 to 81, becoming the first African-American woman and the second woman ever to serve on the rules committee. She also became the first African-American candidate for a major party's nomination for the presidency and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1972. She is Shirley Chisholm and she's going to be represented by Barbara Winslow. Barbara Winslow is receiving the award on Shirley's behalf. Shirley Chisholm's book was called Unbought and Unbossed and I think that is a good title, a good description of all the people we've honored on the program this evening. I'm humbled by all the talent and the leadership that is on the stage and also in the room. It's an extraordinary night of togetherness. And as I said at the beginning, while we celebrate firsts, let's make a pledge that a lot of these are also lasts, that we really do see a new world, the world that these women have helped us create a possibility of inclusion, of understanding and of empathy. Creativity is all about eliciting a certain kind of connection. And I think connection really is the new capital, connection, communication, creativity, curiosity. I end our show every week by saying be kind, be curious. And I think that's the lesson that I take from both this institute and all the firsties we've celebrated here tonight. Those of you who purchased dinner tickets can make your way to the Bozar Court in just a moment. We're gonna welcome back though to the stage, I believe, all of our award winners in order to take a picture. Isn't that right? Am I right in that? Yes, yes, yes, yes, come on back. Generations of feminists.