Long before ‘feminist art’ was a commercial category, the New Zealand photographer-turned-painter Alexis Hunter (1948–2014) made sensual, feral, and unapologetic paintings in the 1980s and 90s, works that blended romanticism with tropes of history painting to forge a new female mythology. At Totah, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, her work is on view in a solo exhibition—the first in the U.S. in 40 years—curated by fellow New Zealander Sophia McKinnon. Hunter, who spent much of her life in London, was one of the first artists to use photography to radically expose and exploit the male gaze. In the 1970s, she used her camera lens to sexualize men, annotating the images with the words “yes,” “no,” or “maybe.” Some museum workers refused to hang those pieces. Hunter shifted to painting, using it as a vehicle for reclaiming power from old forms: women weren’t classical nudes, heroines, or victims; they were animals or spirited hybrids that resisted categorization and learned new modes of survival. At a time when Britain was being radicalized by Margaret Thatcher’s politics, Hunter was clear that it amounted to gross, systematic inequality. Hunter’s mythos told women to keep pushing: transformation, she seemed to say, is strength. —Jonathan Margolis