Exactly half a century ago, we experienced the first wave of feminism in art museums - it consisted largely of writing neglected women artists back into a history of art. Some women protested that the male dominated canons of what constituted "good art" remained intact and women artists were simply slipped into the cracks. Nevertheless the tradition of art history was considerably enriched by the overdue recognition of the female presence.

Some women objected to being included in "women only" exhibitions, historically Margaret Preston and Georgia O'Keeffe were famous for not wanting to be exhibited in "she-gender" shows. In a famous anecdote in feminist art history concerning two of America's most famous women artists, Elaine de Kooning once recalled a party where she and Joan Mitchell were asked, "What do you women artists think?" Mitchell interrupted, "Elaine, let's get the hell out of here". Many women artists want to be known as artists first; their gender or race is a secondary matter.

So what has changed in the arts since 1970s feminism? Arguably a lot and, at the same time, not much. According to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 51 per cent of the visual artists in the world are women, yet women artists rarely make up more than a quarter of the artists on display in our public museums. In the Tate in London, for example, as of 2017 only 27 per cent of living contemporary artists in the Tate Collection were women. In many other major art collections the stats are even more sobering. At the National Gallery of Australia, 25 per cent of its Australian art collection and 33 per cent of its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art collection is by women artists.

The trend for big "all-women" shows in museums and art galleries throughout Europe and America over the past few years is a realisation that a form of "affirmative action" is required to counter the existing gender imbalance. In some institutions, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, they have simply rehung the museum's permanent collection to address various historic imbalances that include gender as well as race. Others have staged large women artists' exhibitions to show the richness and diversity of the women's art scene frequently not on public display.

Know My Name at the NGA is a huge show boasting some 400 works by more than 170 women artists that will require at least two visits, about six months apart, to see it all. COVID has made a mockery of museum exhibition programs, so that the first part of this exhibition opens now and continues until July 4, while the second part opens in mid-July.

What's on show in this first part of Know My Name? This is not an exhibition of women's art that has been brought out of storage from the vaults of the NGA and moved centre stage, but a carefully curated exhibition that has assembled the story of art by women in Australia over the past 120 years seen in some of the finest works by some of our most important female artists. The exhibition is studded with some important strategic loans from galleries throughout the country, the NGA has especially acquired work for this exhibition, and there are other pieces from their collection that rarely, if ever, have seen the light of day.

It is a dazzling visual experience in the normally awkward spaces in the downstairs entry galleries with their super high ceilings. Walls have been rebuilt, clad and removed, and art has been allowed to climb the walls and to be suspended from above. The exhibition has been built around seven themes with porous borders: Connection with country, Performing gender, Collaboration and care, Colour, light and abstraction, Micky's Room, Lineages and Remembering. Chronology is treated in diachronic terms - something that happens with numerous points of reference - rather than a linear construction of time.

Many of the pieces may be familiar to people immersed in Australian art, but the juxtaposition of superb Aboriginal pieces by Sally Gabori, Queenie McKenzie, Judy Watson, Emily Kame Kngwarreye and the Utopia batiks with major installation works by Fiona Hall, Rosalie Gascoigne and Janet Lawrence is quite a revelation. The exhibition is built on a series of subtle interconnections that function visually as well as conceptually.

In another space, Anne Ferran, Tracey Moffatt and Julie Rrap are shown through their monumental series of images in unedited splendour to be juxtaposed with earlier women's representations of female nudes. In yet another gallery there is a great wall of portraits of women artists that gave birth to the title of the exhibition. Other highlights include a selection of panels from Bea Maddock's amazing Terra Spiritus, Inge King's Fetish and a newly acquired installation by Vivienne Binns.

The catalogue of paintings, prints, posters, sculptures, textiles, photographs, videos and installations that the curators Deborah Hart and Elspeth Pitt have brought together is immensely impressive. Ann Newmarch's famous poster proclaims women hold up half the sky (1978) and this exhibition proclaims that women should make up half of the Australian art on display on the walls of our public art galleries and museums.