Art work © Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie / Courtesy the artist / MOMA

In the nineteen-eighties, after four decades as a psychotherapist in St. Louis, Helen Kornblum began collecting photographs by women artists; in 2021, Kornblum donated a hundred pieces to MOMA, where “Our Selves,” a rich exhibition excerpting that gift, is on view through Oct. 10. The show’s title recalls that of the feminist health bible “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” published in 1970, but the pictures, which span the twentieth century, tend to portray bodies obliquely. Louise Lawler’s “Sappho and Patriarch,” from 1984, is an ingeniously framed, starkly moody image of Greek statuary which foregrounds a draped female figure to make a pointed statement about gender and power dynamics in Western art history, as well as in the conventions of museum display. Surrogates also feature in the Italian photographer Tina Modotti’s dramatic black-and-white image “Yank and Police Marionette,” from 1926, in which two puppets cast towering shadows, a tableau inspired by a scene in Eugene O’Neill’s anti-capitalist play “The Hairy Ape.” The Navajo-Tuskegee artist Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (who is also a professor and a museum director) addresses the erasure of Native American identity and the hollow spectacle of televised game shows in her photo collage “Vanna Brown, Azteca Style” (above), from 1990, by reimagining the “Wheel of Fortune” hostess as an Indigenous beauty in dancing regalia. In Lorna Simpson’s salon-style installation “Details,” from 1996, twenty-one poetically captioned archival photogravures, many of them cropped views of hands, evoke dispersed fragments of a family album.