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Documentary on Feminist Fireworks Display Coming to Brooklyn Museum

 A documentary about Judy Chicago's pyrotechnic display,
A documentary about Judy Chicago's pyrotechnic display, "Butterfly for Brooklyn," will screen at the Brooklyn Museum on April 9.
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DNAinfo/Rachel Holliday Smith

PROSPECT HEIGHTS — How do you make a feminist fireworks display?

Artist Judy Chicago will explain exactly that in a new documentary about the making of her 20-minute pyrotechnic display, “Butterfly for Brooklyn,” which fired off in Prospect Park last April.

The enormous light display, spread over an acre of the park’s Long Meadow, took the “butterfly imagery” of female genitalia from Chicago’s famous sculpture of a series of vulva-shaped plates   “The Dinner Party,” on display at the Brooklyn Museum  into the air.

“The butterfly imagery is very basic to 'The Dinner Party,' so I kind of like that idea of that form getting out of the museum, escaping the confines of the plates and liberating itself into the air,” Chicago said in an interview with DNAinfo New York before the display.

As part of a two-day event entitled “Judy Chicago: On Fire,” the Brooklyn Museum will screen the documentary about the show and Chicago’s long career in the feminist art world  including several other pyrotechnic art installations created around the country  on April 9, followed by a dialogue with Chicago the next day at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan.

The viewing of the “Butterfly for Brooklyn” documentary will begin at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 9 at the Brooklyn Museum. It is free with museum admission and open to the public. The artist talk on April 10 at the Museum of Arts and Design is open only to museum members. For more information, visit the artist’s website.