From The Collection

View of the museum from outside showing the Neoclassical building from one corner. The building is a tan-colored stone with an arched doorway, long vertical windows, and detailed molding around the roof.
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Victorian Decadence & Visual Decay

Posted: July 22, 2015
Category: From The Collection
Petah Coyne and Polly Morgan are influenced by the art of Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse. Both artists bring forth otherworldly creations through extremely labor and time intensive processes. The...
Myriad layers of melted pink and white wax encrust and obscure the metal armature for this abstract sculpture, which hangs from satin-wrapped chains. Its color and shape, as well as the bumpy, lacy texture, evoke a frilly tutu, lavishly frosted wedding cake, or coral accretions.

Painting with Confidence: Early Female Self-Portraiture

Posted: July 15, 2015
Category: From The Collection
Self-portraits convey more than just appearances—they affirm an artist’s identity. In the 16th and 17th centuries, women artists made portraits of themselves in their studios. Self-portraiture helped legitimize women as...
Painting of a trio of smiling musicians. On the left, a man wears a large black hat and plays the violin. On the right sits a man in orange wearing a feathered hat and playing the mandolin. In the center sits a woman dressed in black, opening her mouth in song.

5 Fast Facts: Elisabetta Gut

Posted: July 8, 2015
Category: From The Collection
Impress your friends with five fast facts about Elisabetta Gut, whose work is currently on view in NMWA’s galleries.
A brown, tropical fruit with a large segment of skin removed to reveal small, round pages of sheet music inside instead of fruit flesh. The book rests on a square woodblock with “libra—seme” printed in the bottom-right corner.

Flowers, Fruit, and Fatality

Posted: June 17, 2015
Category: From The Collection
“What is natural?” is the intriguing question surrounding Super Natural. Two of the exhibition’s artists, Rachel Ruysch and Sam Taylor-Johnson, answer this query through their respective works of art.
A still life painting featuring an asymmetrical arrangement of flowers; the central section features pink, orange, yellow, and blue flowers and is dramatically highlighted compared to the background and outer edge of arrangement.

Women with Wanderlust

Posted: June 10, 2015
Category: From The Collection
During the press preview for Super Natural, NMWA Chief Curator Kathryn Wat stressed one fact above all others about featured artist Maria Sibylla Merian: this woman was radical. Not only...
A detailed engraving portrays a large, black and tan lizard with a white belly in precise detail. Facing right and positioned over a green surface and a hatching egg, the reptile bites a long, red and black snake attacking another egg and curling around the lizard's tail.

Uncommon Ground: Summer Exhibitions at NMWA

Posted: May 15, 2015
Category: From The Collection
What is natural? Porcelain grass lawns and anthropomorphic scooters may not be the first objects to come to mind, although they are likely to make a lasting impression. Visitors can...
Detail photograph of ceramic sculpture made to look like a patch of lawn. Individual squares consisting of multiple upright blades of porcelain grass, glazed green, fit together to form a lush rectangular field of grass.

“Say It Enough and It Becomes . . .”

Posted: April 8, 2015
Category: From The Collection
Despite everything we learned in school about sticks and stones, language has an immense impact on the world. Words transform perceptions, and once words are spoken they can continue to...
A silhouette of a woman painting and several words in red and black. The words include "Defensive" and "Jitters", repeatedly painted onto the surface.

5 Fast Facts: Andrea Higgins

Posted: March 16, 2015
Category: From The Collection
Impress your friends with five fast facts about Andrea Higgins, whose work is currently on view at NMWA in the collection galleries.
Close-up detail of a larger abstract artwork features thick black paint meticulously applied in small neat rectangles alternating orientation to form a grid. There is a minuscule amount of space between the tiles that allows a pink background to show through.

The Female Form through Female Eyes

Posted: March 12, 2015
Category: From The Collection
Nearly 300 years apart, Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1656) and French artist Suzanne Valadon (1865–1938) both used their perspectives as women to capture the power and complexity of the female...
Against a dark black and brown background, a light skinned woman in a red dress with wavy reddish-brown hair wears a white cloth and gold crown around her head. Her right hand clutches a palm while her left grazes a spiked breaking wheel. She stares straight at the viewer.

Recent library acquisitions: Bookplates by Helena Bochořáková-Dittrichová

Posted: January 27, 2015
Category: From The Collection
Museum visitors may remember the recent exhibition in NMWA’s Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center featuring wordless novels by the first woman graphic novelist, Czech artist Helena Bochořáková-Dittrichová. Her bold black-and-white...
A bookshelf packed with colorful books about women artists.