In the 1970s the feminist art movement asked two questions together: why are women absent from art history, and why is what women make counted as craft and kept outside art? The Dinner Party, which Judy Chicago completed over five years with the contribution of hundreds of volunteers, answers both with one work.

The piece is a triangular table fourteen metres on each side. Thirty-nine places are set, each for a woman from prehistoric goddesses to Georgia O'Keeffe, each with its own hand-painted porcelain plate and its own embroidered runner. Most of the plates carry vulval motifs abstracted as butterflies or flowers, becoming increasingly three-dimensional along the sequence. The floor beneath the table is laid with porcelain tiles inscribed with the names of 999 further women.

That bodily imagery is also the work's most argued-over feature: whether representing women through their bodies repeats the reduction it opposes has been debated since the 1980s. A second criticism concerns inclusion — the selection is weighted toward Western and white figures, as Black feminists pointed out (Alice Walker's remarks on the Sojourner Truth plate are the best-known instance). The work was refused by museums when first shown and spent years in storage; it entered permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007. It is now the single best-known work of feminist art and a turning point in the questioning of the division between craft and art.