Alison Gingeras Addresses ‘The Woman Question’

‘The Woman Question, 1550–2025’, a new group show at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, spans nearly five centuries of women’s art to explore themes from self-representation to wartime perspectives. In this conversation, curator Alison Gingeras reflects on the exhibition’s feminist roots, the focus on figurative works and Warsaw’s influence on its scope. Emphasizing diversity, archival research and expanding the canon to include previously overlooked artists, Gingeras aims to reshape how we view art history.

Ivana Cholakova Let’s start with the exhibition title. Can you talk about how you arrived at ‘The Woman Question’ and how it serves as the organizing framework for the exhibition’s nine thematic chapters?

Alison Gingeras This has been a years-long journey of self-directed learning, moving through the histories of feminism and of women artists and thinkers beyond mainstream accounts and the Anglo-American perspective. I had been reading about the earliest professional woman writer in the French court, Christine de Pizan, and her Le Livre de la cité des dames [The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405]. She uses the term la querelle des dames – the woman question – which marks one of the earliest moments in which women emerge as a defined social and political category.

I became interested in feminism [from] before it was named as such, and in the continuity of women as agents in intellectual and cultural life. I was very influenced by Mary Garrard, one of the foremost authorities on Artemisia Gentileschi and women artists of the 16th and 17th centuries. She argues that ‘the woman question’ is the origin point of feminist thought. For me, the term also avoids imposing second-wave feminist frameworks as the dominant principle: it is instead an earlier, more capacious term that gathers the multiplicity of women’s practices and ideas without confining them to English-language feminist writings.

IC The exhibition spans nearly five centuries of women’s art. What first inspired you to take on such a broad historical scope – and what challenges did it bring?

AG It was certainly challenging. I kept returning to Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris’s exhibition ‘Women Artists: 1550–1950’ [at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1976–77] – a watershed moment – and reflecting on how a transhistorical show of that scope hasn’t happened in the 50 years since. Looking closely at that exhibition, which emerged at the very dawn of feminist art history, you see there was no attempt to trace overarching iconographic or thematic through-lines. It was essentially a chronological presentation of women artists, many of whom had been forgotten, obscured or left in storage.

Given the decades of scholarship that have followed, the challenge now is how to make visible the continuity of women’s artistic production across these centuries – without attempting an encyclopaedic survey. Instead, I worked with themes: self-representation, erotic agency, allegorical expressions of power. What interested me were the electric moments of dialogue between historical works and those by 20th- and 21st-century artists. There were, of course, limitations due to pragmatic realities: how difficult it is to secure loans for much of this material, or even to locate certain works. I had to begin with what was historically available and then build the project outward from there.

IC The show privileges figurative painting and sculpture. What makes these modes especially suited to exploring the woman question?

AG I wanted to create a highly accessible exhibition that even someone unfamiliar with art history or feminist discourse could immediately grasp through images of women engaged in recognizable acts. Enabling such an encounter – and not only with European women, but artists from other continents using the genre’s visual storytelling – was crucial in shaping the research. Of course, the show doesn’t claim to offer an exhaustive overview. Leaving out abstraction, for instance, opens up an entirely different set of questions – it’s an important subject, but one I felt we couldn’t address meaningfully within the space and parameters we had.

IC In researching the show, was there a particular artist or story that changed how you think about women’s place in art history?

AG There are so many, but the historical heroine for me is Sofonisba Anguissola. Her father, who was almost a proto-feminist, educated his five daughters in the mid-16th century and arranged for Sofonisba to train in an artist’s studio outside the home. Her exceptional status fed into her conceptual approach to painting. She produced self-portraits repeatedly at a time when artists of any gender rarely did so – prefiguring Rembrandt in terms of repetition. She not only created this agency for herself but fashioned a kind of persona. She became known and sought after, eventually travelling to Spain as both a lady-in-waiting and a court artist. In her nineties she lived in Sicily, where she was visited [in 1624] by Anthony van Dyck, who painted her portrait. Apparently, she even instructed him on how to paint it. It’s such a wonderful story, and really, Sofonisba should be one of those artists known by her first name – she’s an icon of women’s artistic agency.

IC Can we talk about the physical context of the exhibition? The show opens in Warsaw: how did the location influence your curatorial approach?

AG This curatorial experience, and the sustained exchange with peers here, really opened my eyes to how, given the Soviet context, second-wave feminism wasn’t taken up before 1989 in the same way it was in the West. I’ve tried to show the simultaneity of women who may not have carried the feminist banner in the same ways their Western counterparts did in the 1950s or ’70s, but whose sense of empowerment still existed within a kind of socialist feminism.

For that reason, I included a number of social realist artists in the exhibition, not only from Poland but also from Ukraine – including figures such as Alla Gorska and Tetiana Yablonska. The final chapter, ‘Wartime Women’, is the most direct response to the present moment; we are living in wartime, right on the border with Ukraine. The arts community here has embraced people arriving from Ukraine, Belarus and other former Soviet republics. I felt strongly that dismantling the gendering of war was a valiant gesture. That section stages a Polish–Ukrainian dialogue between works made around World War II and the Holocaust on one side and works responding to the current conflict in Ukraine on the other.

IC Could you expand on this idea of the gendering of war?

AG I think there’s been an assumption, historically, that men are the bellicose ones while women remain at home – tending the fires, caring for children, waiting, mourning. I was very inspired by a comment made by Olena Zelenska, the First Lady of Ukraine, at the beginning of the conflict, in which she said that this war has a particularly female face. That isn’t only because there are many women combatants – in the exhibition I’m showing the work of Marharyta Polovinko, who died on the front and left behind a series of war diary drawings – but also because of women’s roles as witnesses and as political agents advocating against war and fascism. Bringing those perspectives to the fore felt essential when shaping that section of the exhibition.

IC Looking at the show more broadly, what do you hope will be the lasting impact of ‘The Woman Question’, both for viewers and for future curatorial practices?

AG Currently, this work of looking at feminist art history has become a catalyst for questioning everything we thought we knew: returning to the archive, re-examining overlooked material and thinking more imaginatively about hierarchies. Whatever intersectional feminism means politically, it also demands vigilance about gatekeeping. That’s why it was important to me not only to foreground ethnic, racial and geographical diversity but also to include artists who are formally trained alongside those who are not.

I tried to stage those dialogues throughout the exhibition. The politics of alliance on paper needs to translate into curatorial practice: interrogating your own presuppositions and pushing yourself to reframe learned categories. That willingness to be unsettled, to open up the canon, felt central to the project.

‘The Woman Question 1550–2025’ is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw until 3 May 2026

_{Main image: ‘THE WOMAN QUESTION 1550–2025’, 2025, exhibition view from the ‘CITY OF WOMEN’ section. Courtesy: Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; photograph: Alicja Szulc}