Nearly four decades before the term "manspreading" entered popular discourse, West German artist Marianne Wex meticulously documented the gendered nature of body language. During the 1970s, Wex photographed men and women on the streets of Hamburg, capturing how men frequently sat or stood with legs and arms spread wide while women adopted more constricted and inward postures. Over five years, she compiled thousands of these images, drawn from street photography, advertising, magazines, and art history texts, organizing them into categories such as “sitting legs,” “standing arms,” and “lying down” on over 200 large wooden panels.

This extensive body of work culminated in the 1977 exhibition “Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures,” shown in Berlin. Despite its early feminist significance, the project remained largely obscure for decades. However, beginning in 2018, Wex’s work gained renewed recognition: she was represented by a gallery and within months, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the entire series. Wex died two years later at age 83.

MoMA is now presenting "Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives," the first full exhibition of Wex’s work in the United States, running through May 2. The show situates her panels alongside contemporary artists whose work addresses race, colonialism, political ideology, and gender identity, challenging and expanding Wex’s original framework.

The exhibition’s lead curator, Roxana Marcoci, emphasized that Wex’s legacy transcends a historical feminist artifact. The show’s layout requires visitors to navigate between the 1970s photographs and contemporary responses, fostering dialogue between different eras and identities. For example, Wex’s images of men exerting “possessive holds” contrast with a self-portrait by Latinx artist Martine Gutierrez, a trans and nonbinary artist, who subverts traditional gender binaries by posing with a mannequin rather than a male subject.

Wex’s original project also acknowledges exceptions to normative gender postures. She documented men adopting traditionally feminine poses and women embodying typically masculine stances, revealing that such gestures are socially learned rather than innate. Judith Rodenbeck, an art historian, noted that these “glitches” in the data are crucial for understanding gender as performative and fluid, making Wex’s work important to ongoing discussions about nonbinary identities.

Born to Nazi parents and raised in a divided Germany, Wex was a lifelong feminist committed to confronting societal norms. She pursued her study of body language partly out of personal inquiry into why she often sat constrained, even alone. After completing the project, she withdrew from art to focus on healing practices, storing the panels until they were rediscovered in 2014 by gallerist Tanya Leighton, who recognized their cultural and political significance.

The exhibition's design further reinforces the interplay of identity and power. Walls painted in vivid colors and textured materials hold artworks by contemporary artists such as Nona Faustine, who physically engages with Manhattan’s colonial history through a powerful performance photograph, and Wendy Red Star, whose pieces critique Western institutions’ classification of Indigenous artifacts. Yuki Kihara’s photographs reimagine colonial representations through a Polynesian lens, highlighting the a’fafafine gender category and underscoring ongoing struggles over space and identity.

Kihara, unable to attend the show’s opening due to immigration concerns, described her absence as a “deeply emotional choice,” reflecting the persistent challenges faced by marginalized communities in claiming their place within global cultural institutions. Together, the exhibition traces a history of body language as a site of power, resistance, and transformation across time and identities.