Feb 27 to Jul 26, 2026

Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection brings together approximately 80 works by nearly 70 of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Magdalena Abakanowicz, Cecily Brown, Sheila Hicks, Jenny Holzer, Julie Mehretu, Joan Mitchell, Faith Ringgold, Tschabalala Self, Amy Sillman, Lorna Simpson, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Pat Steir, Sarah Sze, Kara Walker, and Zarina. Featuring a wide variety of artworks from the past eight decades—including painting, sculpture, installation, textile, beadwork, and ceramics—the exhibition emphasizes connections between intergenerational and international artists who circumvent and upend conventions in art-making, embracing craft techniques, inventive methods, and alternative materials.

The exhibition is organized within seven sections that illustrate key thematic threads: Gestural Abstraction, Luminous Abstraction, Pixelated Abstraction, Disobedient Bodies, Of Selves and Spirits, The Power of Form, and Craft is Art. Each section juxtaposes works by emerging artists with the pathbreaking contributions of their predecessors, demonstrating how earlier generations anticipated contemporary perspectives on representation, identity, and power. Making Their Mark envisions art history as an interconnected web of influences and affinities among artists who subvert traditional narratives and hierarchies in a historically patriarchal field.

Many of the works on view question rigid and gendered distinctions between art and craft, eroding arbitrary and increasingly obsolete categories and value systems. Making Their Mark assembles significant works by artists whose innovative explorations demonstrate expansive vocabularies of art-making, highlighting the importance of prioritizing diverse perspectives to change the way art histories are told.

About Making Their Mark Foundation

The Making Their Mark Foundation supports scholarship and public engagement, highlighting the achievements and innovations of women artists. Through a wide range of projects and partnerships with educational institutions, arts organizations, and arts leaders, the Foundation works to bring greater recognition to art by women and to rectify the underrepresentation of women in public collections, exhibitions, and art historical narratives.

A painting featuring a map of the United States oriented vertically at a ninety-degree angle. The outlines of states appear in shades of brown, white, and red. The text “In the future we will all be mixed bloods” is printed in the center. Green, yellow, black, and white geometric patterns fill the background.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, In the Future Map, 2021; Mixed media on canvas, 72 x 47 3/4 in.; Shah Garg Collection; © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith; Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York; Photo by Ian Reeves

Exhibition Sponsors

Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection is curated by Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director and Chief Curator of High Line Art in New York City.

Presentation of the exhibition at NMWA is made possible by the Sue J. Henry and Carter G. Phillips Exhibition Fund and the Making Their Mark Foundation. Additional support is provided by Marcia Myers Carlucci, the Clara M. Lovett Emerging Artists Fund, Share Fund, San Francisco Advocacy for NMWA, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, and the Estate of Lisa Claudy Fleischman.