The Woman Question 1550-2025

A feminist study of creative agency by renowned curator Alison M. Gingeras.

Through contributions from eminent experts, including feminist art historian Griselda Pollock and philosopher Chiara Bottici, and detailed notes on one hundred select artworks with images, The Woman Question 1550-2025 brings together over five centuries of cultural production to address ways gender, power, and agency have intersected over time. It challenges the notion that women artists before the twentieth century were rare exceptions.

This transhistorical book and accompanying exhibition curated by Alison M. Gingeras demonstrate that while often underrecognized and working against various social prohibitions, women have had continuous creative agency--and have exercised their artistic power in decisive ways to assert their vital presence and unique lived experiences.

Alison M. Gingeras is an American curator and writer based in Warsaw, Poland. Her extensive curatorial career includes curatorships at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. She currently serves as an adjunct curator at Dallas Contemporary and a guest curator at MSN Warsaw. In addition to her curatorial endeavors, Gingeras contributes writings to publications such as Artforum, Playboy, Tate etc., and Spike. Her essays have been compiled into an anthology titled Totally My Ass and Other Essays.