Judy Chicago Turned Women’s Art Into a Public Monument
Tiffany Shlain calls Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party the first artwork every American should see, arguing that its monumental scale reclaims women’s place in history through forms long dismissed as “women’s art.” For Shlain, Chicago’s triangular installation turns craft, decoration and repeated place settings into a public feminist monument. Its broad historical reach, she says, is inseparable from the situated perspective of a Jewish feminist American artist.
A monument built from forms treated as minor
Tiffany Shlain names Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party as the first artwork she believes every American should see. Her reason is both historical and formal: she calls it a landmark feminist work that “reclaims women throughout history,” and sees that reclamation as newly urgent in an America whose making, she says, women helped create.
The installation’s visible structure gives that argument physical scale. A large triangular table fills a darkened room, with elaborate place settings and embroidered runners extending along its sides. A close view identifies settings for “Primordial Goddess” and “Fertile Goddess.” Rather than separating historical recognition from decoration or craft, Shlain reads the work’s materials as the means by which Chicago makes women’s history public and monumental.
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 is the crucial reversal in Shlain’s account. The forms she describes as having been considered “women’s art” are not softened or hidden inside a conventional monument. They are enlarged into the monument’s visual language. The table’s repeated settings make the work less like an isolated tribute than a constructed space for bringing many women and female figures into view.
The installation photographs support the point without requiring an inventory of its components. Donald Woodman’s images show the table as both an expansive triangular environment and a sequence of intensely worked individual settings. The scale is inseparable from the density of the details: the work asserts historical importance through forms that had been treated as lesser.
We help create this country.
Shlain says her own work stems from that proposition. Chicago’s installation matters to her not simply as a record of women who should be remembered, but as a model for how an artist can make a claim about women’s place in history through the terms of the artwork itself.
A global feminist history seen from an American position
Shlain calls The Dinner Party a “powerful American feminist piece of art,” while also describing it as citing and bringing forward feminists throughout history. Her explanation avoids a narrow definition of American art based on whether every reference is national. The work is American, in her account, because it proceeds from Judy Chicago’s particular perspective.
Tiffany Shlain describes Chicago as “a strong Jewish feminist American artist.” She also points to “Judy Chicago” as “kind of a renaming” through which the artist claims Americanness. Shlain’s emphasis is on the expressive meaning she sees in the name, rather than on a factual account of how that name was adopted.
“An artist has a specific viewpoint,” Shlain says, “that’s what’s very powerful.” This is the tension her interpretation resolves: The Dinner Party reaches across history, yet it does not pretend to speak from nowhere. It gathers feminist figures through the viewpoint of an artist who identifies herself as Jewish, feminist, and American.
A press image credited to the Through the Flower Archives shows Chicago seated within the triangular installation. Alongside the images of the long table and its named settings, that image makes Shlain’s point concrete: the work creates a collective historical space, but it remains shaped by the person who constructed it.
For Shlain, then, the work’s American character is not diminished by its broad historical reach. Chicago’s perspective is what gives the installation a location and a force. The artwork can reclaim women across history while making an American feminist declaration because it openly does so from a situated artist’s point of view.