The Modernist painter Eva Gonzalès depicted scenes of contemporary French life, often focusing on the experiences of bourgeois women. In Portrait of a Young Woman, Gonzalès depicts her elegantly dressed younger sister, Jeanne. During the 19th century, the image of a fashionable Parisian woman became a common symbol in art and literature for Paris itself, representing the city’s status as a global center for art, culture, commerce, and innovation. Everything from Jeanne’s dress in its ivory shades of silk and satin, the tasteful gold bangle, the delicate wisps of bird plumes on her hat to even the floral-patterned interior décor were styles that were in vogue at the time.

This painting held pride of place at the home of NMWA’s late founder, Wilhelmina Cole Holladay. Upon entering the residence, visitors were immediately greeted by Gonzalès’s Parisienne, displayed in the family foyer. She looks out at us with a hint of a smile, as stylish, graceful, and evocative now as she was in her day.

Since the 1970s, Graciela Iturbide has encapsulated urban and rural life in Mexico through her intimate and poetic black-and-white photographs. Iturbide lived amongst Indigenous communities for months, building a sense of trust and collaboration with her sitters. Such was the case with this community of Zapotec women in Juchitán, a small city in the state of Oaxaca in southeastern Mexico.

In Zapotec culture, women are known for their economic, political, and sexual independence. Women in Juchitán generally run the economy, managing and controlling the local outdoor markets.

Iturbide often playfully and artistically records Zapotec women with iguanas, chickens, or, in this case, fish for sale. Animals serve as sources of food and ritual sacrifice, as well as spirit guides for each individual. Her images point to the women’s economic liberties, but also to this important coexistence between people and animals in Juchitán folklore and culture.

Preoccupied with ideas of womanhood, nationality, and family, Joana Vasconcelos frequently incorporates crafts like knitting and crochet into her art. She also uses common Portuguese household items like ceramic figures. Viriato is one such example of a mass-produced lawn ornament, a ceramic German shepherd, which the artist has swathed in green handmade crochet. This is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the conditions of domesticity, the yarn fabric covering the dog symbolizes the simultaneous imprisonment and protection of women in the domestic sphere.

Vasconcelos was born in Paris after her family fled the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal and sought refuge in France. They returned to their home country following the Carnation Revolution that overthrew Portugal’s authoritarian regime in 1974. Vasconcelos trained in Lisbon, where she now lives and works. The artist often incorporates elements from her cultural background into her art. Her works possess a decorative and sensual visual language that borrows from the 17th-century Portuguese Baroque style of art and architecture.

Elizabeth Catlett, who was born in Washington, DC, in 1915 and attended Howard University, is primarily known as a sculptor and printmaker. Catlett went on to obtain her master’s degree from the University of Iowa in 1940, where she was the first Black woman to do so. After time spent in New Orleans, Chicago, and Harlem, Catlett traveled to Mexico in 1946 where she remained for the rest of her long life. Catlett’s style is a reflection of multiple influences, including the stylized forms found in many Pre-Columbian cultures.

In Stepping Out, Catlett evokes the totemic figures found in the art of ancient Egypt, West Africa, and Mesoamerica, while at the same time identifying the subject as a thoroughly modern woman. The woman’s dress and high heels anchor her firmly in the present, and her confident pose conveys pride and strength.

Looking closely at La Llamada, or The Call, by Remedios Varo, you may notice the central figure carrying various intriguing objects. These are alchemical tools, including a mortar and pestle around her neck, that represent a common theme in Varo’s work. Closely associated with the Surrealist artists of the time, Varo was interested in alchemy, astrology, mysticism, science and magic, among many other subjects. The figures in her work are often human-esque and androgenous, with components that appear mechanical or animal in nature. Though not self-portraits, the faces reflect Varo’s own features, particularly her big eyes and long straight nose. She was among the most prominent women artists creating in a surrealist-style and her works, including La Llamada, exemplify the ways Varo broke out of the expected role of woman-as-muse into woman-as-artist.

The Pueblo people traditionally used large ceramic vessels like this one for storing water, cooking, and ceremonial purposes. Maria Martinez hand built this jar using coils of clay, a century’s-old process she learned beginning in childhood by observing female relatives. Yet, despite its connections to time-honored practices, this piece was never intended for utilitarian purposes. In fact, the firing process Martinez and her husband Julian used to transform reddish natural clay into blackware yielded pots that were neither as hard as typical household vessels, nor entirely watertight.

Jars like this one functioned instead as fine art objects, increasingly sought by collectors in the 1920s and beyond, who valued their aesthetic properties, especially the mirror-like surfaces and contrasting matte designs. Even the color appealed to a modernist sensibility. Even Martinez herself was once quoted as saying, “Black goes with everything.” Further extending this evolution of utilitarian ceramics into art objects, Martinez began signing her pots, becoming the first Pueblo potter to do so.

American feminist artist, educator, and writer Judy Chicago began her career as a Minimalist. Yet the breadth and depth of her work, subject matter, and processes suggest she is anything but.

Chicago’s subject matter investigates birth and death; the personal and the political; sexuality and gender; historical and contemporary women; and even extinct, endangered, and domesticated animals (cats may be her favorite).

Her experimentation with a variety of materials blurs lines between industrial manufacturing, craft, and fine art. She has explored the ephemeral, including dry ice and colored smoke, and more permanent media, such as porcelain, textiles, photographs, and prints. Chicago is known for gaining skills, like auto painting, and gathering specialists, from embroiders to pyrotechnicians, to bring her ideas to life.

Where have you traveled that left a lasting impact? For animal lover and painter Rosa Bonheur, it was Scotland, where she toured with her partner Nathalie Micas in 1856. Bonheur trekked through the rugged terrain and wet weather of the Scottish Highlands. There she closely observed and sketched ovine and bovine subjects. This experience informed much of her output over the next decade, including Highland Raid. This work’s large-scale, minute details and dramatic mood often stop viewers in their tracks, much as the herded livestock seem frozen on this road, or raid in Old English. Though she occasionally painted people, as we see here, her lifelong passion was depicting realistic and expressive animals. In Bonheur’s words, “As far as males go, I only like the bulls I paint.”

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation in Montana. Deeply connected to her heritage, Smith creates work that is rooted in storytelling. Her politically charged and humorous imagery combines texts and popular culture alongside desert landscapes, horses, maps, and petroglyphs. Smith refers to paintings like Indian, Indio, Indigenous as narrative landscapes. We see pictographs of the natural world, like bear, coyote, and deer, juxtaposed with mocking inscriptions such as, “It takes hard work to keep racism alive” and “Money is green: it takes precedence over nature.” Smith sharply critiques the destruction of the environment and Native American culture as a result of Euro-American influence and corporate greed.

Smith calls herself a cultural arts worker. Not only is she an artist, but she is also an educator, curator, and activist. While training in the arts, she recalls being told by a professor that women could not be artists, and later discovered that only Native American men exhibited in galleries. Smith became dedicated to championing Native American women artists and has consistently organized and curated exhibitions since the 1970s.

Frequently using 19th-century portrait photographs as source material, Hung Liu uses her paintings and prints to elevate those who were often exploited in their lifetimes and have been lost to history. This is part of a series of four two-paneled paintings or diptychs. Featuring a female figure on the larger canvas and a “cynical fish” on the smaller one, each painting is layered with symbolic imagery, some recurring, like Liu’s signature drips and ever-present circles, and others selected for the season, such as the white bamboo. As Liu described, “It’s my offering to honor them, and the fish can accompany the women in all four seasons…I’d like to summon their ghost spirits, to make sure they are not forgotten. My painting them is to memorialize them.”

Like the bride she portrayed in this painting, Lavinia Fontana married and had children. But the similarities largely end there. Following her marriage, Fontana became the family’s breadwinner, supporting her husband and their 11 children.

Fontana’s ability to build and sustain the network of patrons required for such success had much to do with the powerful and influential noblewomen of Bologna. A 1678 book about the city’s painters highlighted Fontana’s celebrity status, noting:

“For some time, all the Ladies of the City would compete in wishing to have [Fontana] close to them, … considering themselves fortunate to have seen her on the street, or to have meetings in the company of the virtuous young woman; the greatest thing that they desired would be to have her paint their portraits.”

Fontana’s talents also included business savvy, for she named many of these noblewomen as godmothers for her numerous children, thus securing additional connections to the most influential families in Bologna.

A trailblazing figure of the mid-20th century, Niki de Saint Phalle conveyed her feminist vision through colorful works of art. In the 1960s, Saint Phalle took aim at patriarchal power structures with her Tirs paintings. These assemblages featured found objects and paint containers embedded in plaster, which, when punctured by the artist with rifle fire, sprayed color across the otherwise white artworks. Eventually, Saint Phalle shifted towards figural representation in her work and a softer approach to her feminism. Her Nanas, simplified representations of female bodies covered in colorful patterns, are often posed in motion with outstretched arms and legs. While playful, they also reflect the mid-20th century archetype of the liberated woman. “I am not someone who can change society, except through showing some kind of vision of these happy, joyous, domineering women,” she said. Pregnant Nana depicts a woman with enlarged breasts and buttocks and a protruding stomach, inspired by ancient fertility statuettes. While the realities of pregnancy and motherhood are nuanced, this work projects energy and joy.

The neon sculpture by Yael Bartana titled What If Women Ruled the World? actually came out of a theatrical performance in which Bartana directed actors who played women scientists, women artists, and women activists seeking solutions to humanity’s most urgent problems. The project was partly a reflection on Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, in which a group of men discussed nuclear war and its aftermath.

Bartana’s wall sculpture emits an eerie fluorescent glow, and as you approach it, you’re hit with her provocative question. Regardless of a person’s political outlook, it’s very reasonable to wonder: if women were making policy globally, would the world be different? I especially love seeing people pose for photos next to this sculpture. I think they take Bartana’s idea as real inspiration.