As interventions within contemporary art’s ongoing male and Western hegemonies, two recent, groundbreaking shows of global women artists, Global Feminisms and Tiger by the Tail! Women Artists of India Transforming Culture, were timely. After seeing Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum last spring, I was equally thrilled to see it remixed at the Davis Museum in the fall—thrilled because the show is needed, because it is exciting to discover new artistic responses to age-old problems, and because it is still regrettably rare to see feminist concerns addressed overtly in art. The Davis version of the show was truncated, which allowed for greater space and attention to the works it did include, even if it left out some of my favorites, like Lee Bul’s evocative sculpture Ein Hungerkünstler (2004) and Boryana Rossa’s wonderfully funny video of two women screaming in scratched rhythms, Celebrating the Next Twinkling (1999), which appears on the catalogue cover. The show is groundbreaking as the first major exhibition of its kind—a global spectrum of contemporary artwork (all created since 1990) made by women and thematically related to issues central to feminism, broadly defined (thus the plural of “feminisms” in the title). While not every work achieved the...