The 20th century didn’t introduce the notion of gender as a malleable value, but it certainly brought the examination of shifting gender identity fully into public view. What freaked out the squares in Shakespeare’s time continues to freak them out in ours, which must come as a relief to the 18 artists whose narrative photographs and portraiture comprise “Role Models,” a collection of 70 provocative pictures on view at the National Museum for Women in the Arts. The show, the brainchild of NMWA Director Susan Fisher Sterling, is a veritable catalogue of the ways imagery defines identity, even — or perhaps especially — when the authors of said imagery are skilled artists with a full understanding of the semiotic weight of their pictures.

       

Subtitled, “Feminine Identity in Contemporary American Photography,” the show is bracing and provocative even when it’s inscrutable.  The show cleanly delineates two generations of female photographers.  The first, emerging in the early 1980s (Sally Mann, Mary Ellen Mark, Laurie Simmons) was born between 1940 and 1960, thus coming of age just as the “second wave” of the feminist movement was gathering steam. 

First among these was Cindy Sherman, who satirized and repurposed traditional modes of femininity as presented by magazine advertisements, film, and television with her “Untitled Film Stills” series circa 1977-80.  Casting herself in various roles, Sherman created photos that could double as performance art. “She’s good enough to be a real actress,” Andy Warhol once said of Sherman.  She’s represented in this show by three early 80s pieces and one from 1989, charting an arc of increasing sophistication through the decade.