Current Exhibitions

Close-up detail of an abstract painting with very thick and gestural brushstrokes of mostly orange paint.

Featured Current Exhibition

Apr 14 to Aug 11, 2024
Visionary artists reimagine the past, present alternate realities, and inspire audiences to create different futures. During the past few years, our world has been transformed by a global pandemic, advocacy for social reform, and political division. How have these extraordinary times inspired artists? Works by the 28 artists featured in "New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024" explore these ideas from perspectives that shift across geographies, cultural viewpoints, and time.
View Exhibition: New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024
A woman in a blue dress and white face paint stands in a vast green landscape. She looks off to the side while carrying a foliage-covered lantern on her back. Two blue birds rest on her feather and wicker headdress.
Meryl McMaster, Lead Me to Places I Could Never Find on My Own I, from the series “As Immense as the Sky,” 2019; Digital C-print, 40 x 60 in.; Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery, and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain

All Current Exhibitions

  • Remix: The Collection

    Oct 21, 2023, to Oct 21, 2025

    Remix showcases familiar collection favorites as well as never-before-exhibited recent acquisitions. Artworks are grouped around themes, in some cases anchored by a medium and in others by an idea, that resonate among global artists across time, including photography, fiber works, the colors red and purple, nature, domesticity, and more.

    A horizontal canvas combines collaged paper, such as a scrap of a U.S. map, comic strip, and pictographs; cloth swatches; scrawled and dripped paint; and phrases like “It takes hard work to keep racism alive” and “Oh! Zone.” The work’s title appears in red paint right of center.

    Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Indian, Indio, Indigenous, 1992; Oil and collage on canvas, 60 x 100 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Museum purchase: Members' Acquisition Fund; Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

  • In Focus: Artists at Work

    Oct 21, 2023, to Mar 30, 2025

    Enjoy a close-up look into the practices and perspectives of eight contemporary collection artists via short documentary-style videos. Presented in NMWA’s ground-floor Long Gallery, these captivating short films welcome visitors to the renewed museum. The installation’s intimate and immersive design sparks curiosity, inspires advocacy, and encourages slow looking during visitors’ exploration of the museum. The videos will premiere throughout the year. 

    A dark gallery space with three large screens playing a video. Three tufted benches are in front of the screens. On the right wall, it says

    In Focus: Artists at Work (installation view) at the National Museum of Women in the Arts; Photo by Joy Asico-Smith

  • Impressive: Antoinette Bouzonnet-Stella

    Oct 21, 2023, to Oct 20, 2024

    The Entrance of the Emperor Sigismond into Mantua (1675), an extraordinary series of 25 prints by 17th-century French artist Antoinette Bouzonnet-Stella (1641 to 1676) is presented at NMWA for the first time in almost 15 years. The exhibition explores the circumstances of the work’s creation and focuses on Bouzonnet-Stella’s life in Paris, where she lived and worked with her uncle, artist Jacques Stella, in his prestigious lodgings in the Louvre. There, she produced copies of his paintings and accepted commissions for works such as The Entrance of the Emperor Sigismond into Mantua, her best-known work.

    A black-and-white, horizontal print depicts multiple Roman-style male figures on horseback. They hold weapons or brass musical instruments and process, somewhat chaotically, towards the viewer's right.

    Antoinette Bouzonnet-Stella, Plate 25 from "L'Entree de l'Empereur Sigismond a Mantoue", 1675; Engraving on paper, 9 x 19 1/2 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Chris Petteys; Photo by Lee Stalsworth

  • Holding Ground: Artists’ Books for the National Museum of Women in the Arts

    Oct 21, 2023, to Oct 20, 2024

    Nine new works by celebrated book artists inaugurate NMWA’s new Learning Commons and its reinvigorated Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center. Some of the artists reflect on NMWA as a special place for art by women. Others remind viewers that creativity is expressed in other environs, from small interiors to vast outdoor geographies. Above all, the artists’ books celebrate the varied spaces where women’s creativity blooms. Participating artists include Alisa Banks, Adjoa J. Burrowes, Julie Chen, Suzanne Coley, IBé Crawley, Maricarmen Solis Diaz, Colette Fu, Kerry McAleer-Keeler, and María Verónica San Martín.

    An artist's book, opened to reveal a pop-up of many colorful flowers in a vase. The pages are dark with black writing.

    Colette Fu, A Pop-up Book of Lilies, Roses, Iris, Pansies, Columbine, Love-in-a-Mist, Larkspur and Other Flowers in a Glass Vase on Table Top, Flanked by a Rose and a Carnation (detail), 2023; Archival pigment inkjet prints, repurposed cover and book pages, acid-free adhesives, and bonded leather, 17 1/4 x 11 3/4 x 8 3/4 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift made possible through the generosity of the artist and a bequest from Marjorie B. Rachlin; © Colette Fu; Photo by Colette Fu

  • Hung Liu: Making History

    Oct 21, 2023, to Oct 20, 2024

    “Weeping” paintings and prints by Hung Liu (1948 to 2021) features signature paint drips, layers of color, and cultural symbols that pay homage to overlooked figures in history, predominantly vulnerable women and children from the artist’s native China. Liu lived through Mao Zedong’s totalitarian regime during the Cultural Revolution before immigrating to the U.S., and her work reveals boundless empathy for the plights of the working class. Drawing inspiration from a collection of vintage photographs that she discovered on a return visit to China in the 1990s, she portrays migrant laborers, sex workers, female soldiers, and refugees with dignity, endurance, strength, and courage.

    An etching of a Chinese woman working at a wooden loom. Three colorful birds sit in the foreground of the print in front of the loom. Above the loom hovers a dream-like figure of a Chinese person wearing a long yellow robe. The figure is riding on a mystical red bird.

    Hung Liu, Women Working: Loom, 1999; Softground etching, spitbite aquatint with scraping and burnishing on paper, 31 1/2 x 41 3/4 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore, in memory of the artist and in loving memory of his grandmother, Anna Kemper Albert; © 2023 Hung Liu Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York