In Warsaw, the curator Alison M. Gingeras accepted an audacious challenge and has distilled five centuries of art by women into an exhibition. Her point? That females have not been as absent from the march of art history as is commonly thought. The resulting survey, which includes nearly 200 works, unfolds across nine themed sections, from self-portraiture to abstraction, pairing artists like the 16th-century pioneer Lavinia Fontana with the contemporary painter Somaya Critchlow. Expect surprising juxtapositions. —Elena Clavarino