The Dinner Party Recasts Women’s Art as Monumental History
Artist and filmmaker Tiffany Shlain argues that Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party is an essential American artwork because it makes women’s histories visible at monumental scale. In her reflection for the Aspen Institute Arts Program’s Art of America series, Shlain presents the installation as a feminist reclamation that uses forms long associated with women’s art to assert that women helped create the country’s history.
A monumental table for histories left out of the room
Tiffany Shlain names Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party as the first artwork she thinks every American should see. Her reason is not simply that the work is important within art history. She describes it as a landmark feminist work that “reclaims women throughout history” and, in the American context, insists on a basic claim she connects to her own work: “We help create this country.”
Shlain’s account turns on the relation between scale, subject, and medium. The images shown with her reflection present the installation as a large triangular banquet table, set with many elaborate place settings and illuminated in a dark room. A closer view shows sculpted plates placed on embroidered runners; two visible place names read “Primordial Goddess” and “Fertile Goddess.” The visual emphasis is on an installation that is both ceremonial and materially detailed: individual settings, crafted surfaces, and a table form large enough to read as a public monument rather than a private object.
For Shlain, that monumentality matters because Chicago used forms “considered kind of women’s art” and recast them “in this very monumental, powerful way.” The point is not only that The Dinner Party names women or brings women forward. It also uses art forms associated with women as the means of making that historical claim. The installation’s power, in Shlain’s telling, comes from making the reclamation visible through the very kinds of making that had been diminished or narrowly categorized.
Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party was like the first monumental feminist work that reclaimed that and stated that in such a powerful way, using art itself that was considered kind of women's art and recasting it in this very monumental, powerful way to reclaim women in history.
That phrasing carries Shlain’s central claim. The Dinner Party does not merely refer to women’s history; it stages a reclamation through scale, craft, naming, and form. The banquet table gives the work a structure of recognition. The embroidered runners and sculpted plates make the labor and visual language of the installation inseparable from its feminist argument.
The American claim comes through Chicago’s point of view
Tiffany Shlain also calls The Dinner Party “very American,” but she does not base that claim on a national style or on the idea that the work is only about American subjects. She locates its Americanness in Judy Chicago herself: in her identity, her chosen name, and her specific artistic viewpoint.
Shlain describes Chicago as “a strong Jewish feminist American artist.” Even the name “Judy Chicago” matters in this reading. Shlain calls it “kind of a renaming” and says that, through the name, Chicago is “claiming her Americanness.” The work may cite and bring forward feminists throughout history, but Shlain’s argument is that it does so from Chicago’s perspective. That perspective is not incidental. In Shlain’s words, “an artist has a specific viewpoint” and “that’s what’s very powerful.”
This is a narrower and more precise claim than saying the installation stands for America as a whole. Shlain’s point is that The Dinner Party is an American feminist artwork because it is made from the position of an American feminist artist who is consciously claiming that position. Chicago’s perspective gives the work its frame: a Jewish feminist American artist using a monumental installation to bring women’s histories into view.
The source reinforces that emphasis visually by showing Chicago seated inside the inner space of the triangular table arrangement, smiling toward the camera. The image places the artist physically within the work’s structure. It does not need to prove Shlain’s claim about authorship; it makes legible why her reading centers Chicago’s viewpoint as part of the artwork’s force.
Women’s making becomes a claim on history
The most direct historical claim Shlain attaches to The Dinner Party is the line “We help create this country.” She says a lot of her own work stems from that idea too. In context, the “we” refers to women whose contributions have been pushed out of the dominant historical account and whom Chicago’s work seeks to reclaim.
Shlain’s emphasis is on visibility. The installation matters because it turns reclamation into a material and spatial experience: named places at a table, sculpted plates, embroidered runners, and an overall form that occupies the room. The visuals repeatedly return to the triangular banquet table from wide and close perspectives, allowing the viewer to see both the scale of the installation and the intricacy of the individual settings.
Those details support Shlain’s reading without requiring a broader claim than she makes. She does not offer a full account of the work’s iconography, nor does she list the historical figures represented. Her reflection is more concise: Chicago made a groundbreaking feminist work; the work reclaims women in history; it does so by transforming forms associated with women’s art into a monumental public statement; and it does so from a distinctly American feminist viewpoint.
That is why Shlain’s recommendation is framed broadly. She begins by saying The Dinner Party is the first artwork she thinks every American should see, and she ends by calling it “a powerful American feminist piece of art that every person should see.” The expansion from “every American” to “every person” follows from the way she presents the work: not as a specialist object for feminist art history alone, but as a work that makes women’s place in history visible through its form.