When the Vorticist manifesto was published between the puce covers of BLAST in June 1914, there were two women among the eleven signatories: Jessica Dismorr (1885–1939) and Helen Saunders (1885–1963). However, Saunders’s name was misspelled: “H. Sanders.” It’s tempting to read this as an act of erasure—whether careless or intentional, perhaps inflected with misogyny—by the famously egotistical Wyndham Lewis, who once declared that “Vorticism was . . . what I, personally, said, and did, at a certain period.” (Saunders saw things differently, describing the short-lived movement as “a group of very

In “On Sexuality,” the pioneering early art of Helen Chadwick and Penny Slinger took double-barreled aim at consumer society’s reproduction of traditional gender roles. Dating mostly from the late 1960s and the ’70s, the photographs and videos on display exploded stereotypes of mass-marketed femininity.

Slinger’s preferred method is the photomontage. Prints from her landmark work, 50% The Visible Woman, 1969—published in 1971—were displayed throughout the gallery. They suffuse female sexuality with flashes of body horror. In The Larval Worm, 1969/2014, the art-ist poses nearly naked with