The Women’s Table, 1993
Yale University, New Haven, CT

Associated Architects: Steve Fisher of Edward Larrabee Barres and John M. Y. Lee
Structural Engineers: Spiegel Zamecnik and Shah, Inc.
Fountain Engineer: William Hobbes
Fabricator: Rock of Ages
Photography: Norman McGrath
Additional Photography: Victoria Sambunaris

I was invited to create an artwork that would mark the twentieth anniversary of the university’s allowing women to enroll at Yale College. As I researched the piece, I soon realized that women had been very much a part of Yale’s history in the graduate schools since the 1870s, and before that they had been allowed to sit in on Yale classes— although in one historical account they were referred to as “silent listeners.”

Inscribed upon the ellipse is a spiral of numbers that traces the presence of women at the university, counting the number enrolled at Yale each year from when they were not accepted (1900s) to the present.

The spiral emerges from the water source and grows wider as the number of women enrolled at Yale increased. The choice of a spiral was made to indicate a beginning but to leave the future open, with the last inscription marking the number of women enrolled for the year in which the piece was dedicated.

I chose the color of the stone (Lake Placid Blue) because it is the university’s color; the font for the numerals (Bembo) was the rather quirky font Yale used in its blue book, the course catalog of the college.