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Billops and the wonderful conceptualist Lorraine O'Grady are the only African-American artists who have work in the show, with the collective called "Where We At" Black Women Artists present only in photographs.

The collective, which stayed together from 1971 to 1997, had a fascinating history, though you learn nothing about that in an exhibition that is frustratingly bare of wall labels. (A cellphone tour offered by the museum covers only certain entries, and is short on hard information.)

The fastidious art-speaks-for-itself approach is O.K. for a Brice Marden retrospective, but in a content-intensive historical show with a hefty amount of unfamiliar material it does a disservice to art and audience alike. Without some context, there is simply no way to understand the extraordinary career of Suzanne Lacy, one of the few artists - Ms. O'Grady is another - who deals directly and pointedly with issues of women and class [see photo of Ms. O'Grady's Mlle Bourgeoise Noire]. Nor it is possible to make sense of what's going on in a 1977 performance by the Lesbian Art Project, presented as a silent and unannotated slide show.

Fortunately, work by other lesbian artists is far more accessible and, in the case of short films by Barbara Hammer, sexually explicit, loaded with attitude and hilarious. The show's lesbian artists - among them Ms. Fishman, Ms. Hammond, Tee Corinne (1943-2006) and Nancy Grossman - represent a version of feminism that has particular pertinence today.

With their insistence on experiencing gender - along, one must hope, with race and class - as an unfixed category, but one they control, and their interest in playing with various versions of "great," they are exercising freedoms of choice that feminism always offered: freedom to challenge received truth, to exchange passivity for activism, to find solidarity in diversity, to adopt ambiguity and ambivalence as social and aesthetic strategies. And by doing so, they are acknowledging that the art they are making, whatever form it takes, is political by default.