This exhibition explores the gendered construction and deconstruction of the female body and its representation. Across painting, photography, and sculpture and a range of artistic strategies from abstraction to documentary, the exhibition aims to create a counterpoint to persistent myths and essentializing projections about femininity and gender norms. The artworks on view take up questions of power and self-possession in relation to pleasure, desire, and acts of looking, as well as challenge traditional conceptions of beauty and a fixed gender binary.

Plural Possibilities & the Female Body features works by over twenty artists from the Henry’s collection alongside select loans from Seattle collections. It is presented as part of the Henry’s participation in the Feminist Art Coalition, a nation-wide initiative that seeks to generate cultural awareness about feminist thought, experience, and action. The exhibition locates the feminist pursuits of bodily autonomy and self-determination in solidarity with racial and sexual difference and encourages us to consider the possibilities of the individual and collective female body when freed from bounded limitations.