Judy Chicago has written her second autobiography, Beyond the Flower (Viking, 282 pages, $ 27.95). If you missed the first, don’t worry; Beyond the Flower has everything you could possibly want to know about her. Chicago (nee Cohen) is best known for The Dinner Party, an “installation” that made headlines when she first displayed it in 1979. Although she produced a number of works before and after it, The Dinner Party is the work that simultaneously put her on the map and has kept her off it since. In Beyond the Flower, Chicago explores the central question of her career: why The Dinner Party remains without a permanent site even though nearly one million people have seen it. She thinks the homelessness of her masterpiece is an example of the way in which feminist art has been discriminated against by the art world.

The Dinner Party is a table featuring place settings for 39 women, running the gamut from significant historical figures like Mary Wollstonecraft to mythical creations of feminist ideology like “Primordial Goddess.” (Enlightened classicists will recognize her as the queen of the Land Before Patriarchy.) They vary from the truly influential — Queen Elizabeth I — to the truly obscure — Natalie Barney, a turn-of-the-century lesbian who established a gay-friendly salon in Paris.