“Quiet/Not,” a 17-day show sponsored by the Women at LuigART Collective (which counts this writer as a member), opens Thursday, March 26, in honor of Women’s History Month. Over 40 artists’ work will be featured.

The provocative nature of the show’s name is no accident. What should one make of the ambiguous juxtaposition? “Quiet” and not quiet? Not enough? Not finished? Not compliant? “Quiet/Not” asks us to consider all possibilities and none of them — both at once.

Laverne Zabielski, who conceived and curated the show alongside Diane Kahlo, Christine Stroebel, Cynthia Ryan Kelly, and Michelle Newby Armstrong, says, “When women make art, they are quiet activists. When they exhibit, they roar.” She goes further, stating that feminist art doesn’t have to look like protest art. “The challenge these days,” she once wrote, “is for it to be okay for us to simply create beauty.”

The permission to create beauty — even when the beauty is born out of chaos or pain, or is itself a form of protest — runs through “Quiet/Not” like an invisible thread. And it underscores a fundamental idea in the exhibition: the breadth of the knowledge systems that women have always carried: in their hands and in their practice, across generations, cultures and geographies. Systems so vast, old, complex and inclusive that no single canon or category could ever contain all of them.

I traveled through six states in India last fall and came home altered. In Hindu philosophy, Shiva without Shakti is consciousness with no energy to manifest. Shakti without Shiva is chaos without form. Not opposition. Not hierarchy. Necessary interdependence. Shukla Sawant has traced how British colonial art schools trained generations of Indian artists away from their own traditions only for those artists to later reclaim what became known as “Living Traditions” — the knowledge held in village craft, folk practice, the hands of women who had been making all along without anyone calling it art. K.G. Subramanyan built an entire curriculum around this at Baroda, insisting that contemporary art needed these practitioners as living intellect, not nostalgia. It is the same refusal happening here, at LuigART, in Lexington.

In fact, more than a century ago, when a widely accepted framework of modern art was invented and codified by Alfred H. Barr Jr., the original director of New York’s MoMA, women’s creative labor in the West was excluded. That thinking prevailed and went largely unchallenged until 2019, when MoMA itself began to publicly reckon with its own omissions. But until then, female artists whose work never received even a nod of acknowledgement did what women have always done: making, preserving, handing down. What “Quiet/Not” does, among other things, is insist that the living traditions women carry, whether in thread or clay or song or salvaged wood, are anything but lesser categories.

That hierarchy was no accident. The canon Barr codified set out to establish market value — painting and sculpture at the top, textile and embroidery and pottery somewhere else. The things women actually made, in their homes, across centuries, placed outside the frame.

“Quiet/Not” gathers artists working in radically different registers. Esmeralda Martin creates in the Oaxacan alebrije tradition, shaping figures glazed with the Talavera pottery patterns of Puebla. Her piece, “Axolotl,” layers Nahuatl mythology, cultural geography and transformation into a single form: a figure holding multiple cultural conversations at once.

Mercedes Harn works in textile and embroidery, practices passed down through generations. Diane Kahlo observed that both Esmeralda’s and Mercedes’s work “represents what has been relegated to a lesser position in an art hierarchy, called ‘women’s work’ or just craft. Its worth is devalued rather than elevated as cultural expression and expertise of practices handed down through generations.” Mercedes Harn’s quilted work layers appliqué flowers, birds and butterflies over hand-stitched wave patterns, with the words “Te Amo Mucho” tucked into a branch at the center.