JERSEY CITY, N.J.—All of a sudden, people are talking about feminist art again. The huge survey “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” opened earlier this month at the The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and next week the Brooklyn Museum will initiate the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art with the permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party and a major show titled “Global Feminisms.”

There is a retrospective mood to all this looking back on past feminisms, and it prompted me to ponder what feminist art is in 2007. To try to find out, I made my way to the Visual Arts Gallery at New Jersey City University to see “Homegirls,” a show of feminist work made in the last few years that is on display through April 4.

First, let me say that this is an excellent, wide-ranging show, with some really good work in it. I was particularly struck by Lisa Dahl’s chilling video piece On the Homefront (2006), in which images shot in New Hampshire are accompanied by sound recorded in the midst of a battle in Fallujah; by Nina Levy’s sculpture Stroller (2004), in which her own depicted head stares wide-eyed, in something like horror, from inside an outsize baby stroller; and by the vague but unsettling threat that dwells in Jenne Willis’ exquisite photograph of teacups and spilt sugar Domestic Interference (2006).

Show curator Margaret Murphy explained that she had become aware of a number of contemporary women artists interested in the “home”—considered in a whole range of senses—and that this is the common thread running through the show. For the curator, the feminist nature of the exhibition is quite straightforward. “It’s a feminist show because it’s addressing women’s views on a subject that is particularly interesting to them,” she told me.

Whether that’s in the shape of Christina Mancuso’s video Untitled (Performance #4) in which she carefully embroiders a floral pattern into the palm of her own hand, Stefanie Nagorka’s (Home Alone) 2.20.07 (2007), a gently twisting tower of paving slabs gifted by the local Lowe’s hardware store, or Murphy’s own small paintings of folksy figurines representing clichés of family or married life, the issue apparently is not that these pieces are made from a specifically female perspective.

“Women artists don’t have talk about being women in the work,” Murphy asserts. “They can just make their work, and that in itself is feminist.”

Or maybe it’s not quite that simple. “‘Homegirls’ is obviously a twist on ‘homeboys,’” explained Murphy, when I asked her about the title of her show. “Men are so much better at mythologizing themselves and creating an aura around what they do. I like to flip that and give the women street cred in a real ‘no apologies’ kind of way.”

And why is that? “This way if we want to talk about marriage, children, teacups, lace or anything else we can do so without hesitation,” she said

The artists that Murphy has curated in this show certainly do that, and their work is all the better for it, though I’m still left wondering whether that’s all that the legacy of previous feminist art amounts to.