Alison M. Gingeras, an American curator and writer, has organized a major new exhibition titled “The Woman Question: 1550–2025” at the recently opened Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The show brings together over 200 artworks spanning nearly 500 years of women’s creative production, from Renaissance figures like Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana to Baroque artists such as Elisabetta Sirani and Artemisia Gentileschi, and contemporary names like Betty Tompkins and Lisa Brice. The exhibition explores how women artists have depicted themselves, power, resistance, desire, and violence, drawing on the historical concept of the "querelle des femmes" and Linda Nochlin’s famous 1971 essay. Gingeras discusses the project on the podcast The Art Angle.
This exhibition matters because it directly confronts the long-standing erasure of women artists from art history, offering a sweeping, multi-century corrective that is both scholarly and timely. By staging the show at a new museum in Warsaw, Gingeras underscores that the conversation about women’s place in culture is global and ongoing. The project also reignites debate about the necessity of all-women exhibitions in an era when many institutions claim to have moved beyond gender-based curation, making it a significant intervention in contemporary museum practice and feminist art discourse.