Yayoi Kusama’s “Violet Obsession”

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Drawn from the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, this fine-grained show is part of the museum’s recent focus on art by women, though compared with the concurrent “Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography” upstairs, the scale is intimate — 11 artists in one big gallery — and the media varied.

The day is long past since anyone spoke of women’s art primarily in terms of domesticity and hand-crafting, but there’s evidence of both here. A family home does a war dance in the 1947 drawing “Femme Maison” by Louise Bourgeois, who died last month. And in a set of geometric prints installed just outside the gallery, Zarina Hashmi, who often uses the single name Zarina, suggests the floor plans of the many houses she has lived in since leaving her native India and settling in New York City in the mid-1970s.

Images of weaving abound. You find them in the drawings and prints of grids by the Venezuelan artist Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), the British artist Rachel Whiteread and the German Rosemarie Trockel. Etchings by Atsuko Tanaka are patterned with yarnlike tangles. A collage by the Lebanese-born Mona Hatoum traces delicate designs in human hair.

Yayoi Kusama has covered a rowboat with hundreds of purple phallic forms made from stuffed and sewn cloth. A book by Anna Maria Maiolino, who was born in Italy and lives in Brazil, trails loose threads as if its binding were unraveling. And two embroidered books by Ms. Bourgeois are centerpieces of the show. Soft to the touch, stitched with scraps of this and that, they’re like catalogs of found memories.

The human body carries the memory of sutures and scars in ink drawings by the amazing Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow. A Holocaust survivor who died of cancer in 1973 at age 47, she was primarily a sculptor. Her 1968 polyurethane “Belly-Cushions,” which looks like a stack of throw pillows made from limbless torsos, suggests unsuspected anatomical readings for two suspended wood sculptures by Louise Nevelson.

Maybe it’s coincidence, but in giving visibility to women MoMA seems to be addressing modernism as a truly international phenomenon. In this small show alone — organized by Alexandra Schwartz, a curatorial assistant in the department of drawings, and Sarah Suzuki, an assistant curator of prints and illustrated books — we find contributions from Western and Eastern Europe, India, Japan, the Middle East, South America and the United States. It’s been rare to find so cosmopolitan a mix in this museum, but maybe no longer.

And maybe it will no longer be necessary to isolate women under an “alternative” banner. Thanks largely to the influence of art by women, any number of male artists would have made perfect sense in this show, just as its 11 artists would — no, will — make perfect sense integrated into MoMA’s permanent galleries, where their visibility will become lasting and real.