WASHINGTON—Celebrate spring at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA)! Opening April 14, be the first to visit New Worlds, the seventh and largest installment of the museum’s Women to Watch exhibition series. Hear from leading curators and collectors about their role in supporting equity in their collections and attend hands-on art-making workshops.
The information below is current as of February 2024. All times listed are Eastern Time. For more information, visit the museum’s online calendar. To request access services, please check the online calendar for contact information or email accessibility@nmwa.org.
In the Galleries
Free Community Day
Sunday, April 7; Wednesday, April 10, Sunday, May 5; Wednesday, May 8; Sunday, June 2; Wednesday, June 12; Sunday, July 7; Wednesday, July 10; 10 a.m.–5 p.m.
Visit us on the first Sunday and second Wednesday of each month for free museum admission. Take this opportunity to explore our collection and current exhibitions. Join NMWA educators in the museum’s studio for free, self-directed drop-in art-making activities inspired by artworks on view. Activities and inspirations change each month. Reservations required. Free.
Opening Day: New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024
Sunday, April 14, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.
Be among the first to visit New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024, the seventh and largest installment of the museum’s Women to Watch exhibition series. Presented every three years, Women to Watch is a dynamic collaboration between the museum and its network of outreach committees. The committees participating in New Worlds worked with curators in their regions to create shortlists of artists. From this list, NMWA curators selected the artists and works to exhibit at the museum. In New Worlds, 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 explore these ideas from perspectives that shift across geographies, cultural viewpoints and time. Free with admission.
NMWA Nights
Wednesday, April 17, May 15, 5:30–8 p.m.
Join us for a creative and engaging after-hours experience! Peruse the galleries, grab a cocktail, listen to a performance, attend a tour or participate in art-making and craft activities. Mark your calendar for a great time for you and your friends. Ticket includes two drink tickets; additional drinks for purchase. $25; $22 for seniors/students; $20 NMWA members. Reservations required; tickets available the first week of the preceding month.
Slow Art Day Conversation
Saturday, April 13, 3:30–5 p.m.
Slow Art Day invites you to invest time looking closely at a limited number of artworks. NMWA will help with this process by providing a small selection of works to consider along with slow-looking prompts to help you get started. Then, join an in-person conversation to connect with other art lovers, discuss their experience of slow looking, and learn more about the selected artworks. A NMWA educator will facilitate this conversation. Reservations required. Free with admission.
Gallery Talks
Wednesdays, 12–12:30 p.m.
Facilitated by museum staff members, these conversational thematic talks highlight three to six works on view. Topics and locations in the museum vary. Free. Reservations not required. Meet at the Information Desk.
Collection Highlights Tours
Daily starting April 1, 2–2:45 p.m.
Explore the museum’s collection during engaging, interactive drop-in tours. These guided experiences will feature six to eight works on view highlighting the creative contributions of artists from the 16th century to today. Free with admission. Reservations not required. Meet at the Information Desk.
In the Studio
The Bigger Picture
Sundays, April 28, May 26, 2–3:30 p.m.
Looking to expand your knowledge of women’s contributions to the history of Western art? Tired of outdated surveys that still marginalize them? Join us for a new monthly series that shakes up the traditional chronological and stylistic narratives by exploring art from the 16th century to today through the lens of the museum’s collection and thematic topics. During sessions that combine lectures with conversations in the galleries, Director of Education and Interpretation Deborah Gaston recounts compelling biographies, introduces mediums and genres in which women have innovated and invites participants to share their own observations and insights. Topics include “Natural Wonders” and “All in the Family.” Reservations required. $25; $22 seniors, students and D.C. residents; $20 members.
Firsthand Experience Workshop: Radiant Textures
Saturday, April 13, 10 a.m.–3 p.m.
Experiment with color and texture to make abstract monotypes and sew a luminous, long-stitch journal with artist and writer Jamila Zahra Felton. Art supplies provided. No experience required. Art supplies provided. No experience required. Reservations required. $25; $22 students, seniors and D.C residents; $20 members.
Firsthand Experience Workshop: Zines
Saturday, June 8, 10 a.m.–3 p.m.
Firsthand Experience workshops bring contemporary artists together with learners ages 13 and up for hands-on programs that combine making, gallery conversations, and discovery. This session is an interactive zine-making workshop led by neurodivergent collage artist and designer Jen White-Johnson. Learn how zine-making can be an act of creative resistance and radical joy. Participants will come away from this workshop with a shared understanding of how intersectionality, inclusion, and design justice can inform and shape their zine-making experience. Reservations required. $25; $22 seniors, students and D.C. residents; $20 NMWA members.
Women, Arts, and Social Change
Fresh Talk: Influencing through Collecting
Sunday, June 12, 4–6 p.m.
According to Arts Economics, 2021 was the first year in history when women collectors and arts patrons outspent men. Celebrated for their efforts to ensure equity, representation and appreciation of women artists, leading curators and collectors will discuss how art moves through the modern market and is acquired, donated and displayed. Learn how women and nonbinary people in these roles can influence the representation of women artists in private and public collections. Speakers include: Schwanda Rountree, attorney and independent art consultant; Myrtis Bedolla, owner and founding director of Galerie Myrtis; and Sarah Arison, collector and president of the Arison Arts Foundation. The panel will be followed by Catalyst Cocktail hour. Reservations required. $20; $17 students, seniors and D.C. residents; $15 NMWA members.
Special Events
Spring Gala
Friday, April 12, 6:30–10 p.m.
Join us for a special night at the museum’s largest annual fundraising event. This year, we are thrilled to honor actor Tracee Ellis Ross with the 2024 NMWA Achievement Award for Excellence in the Arts. A trailblazer in the entertainment industry and a passionate advocate for gender equity, Ross embodies the spirit of NMWA’s mission to champion artists and their work. Registration required.
Virtual Programs
Art Chats @ 5
Fridays, April 26, May 24, June 28, July 26, 5–5:45 p.m.
Online
Jump-start your weekend with art from home! Join NMWA educators online for informal 45-minute art chats about selected artworks in the collection. Each week the group will consider a new sampling of artworks. You can even enjoy your favorite happy hour drink or snack during the sessions. Free. Reservations required. Registration for each month’s Art Chats opens by the 20th of the preceding month.
For Educators
ABC Teacher Institute
Monday, July 8 through Friday July 12, 9 a.m.–4 p.m.
Join NMWA educators, professional book artists and curriculum and literacy specialists for this intensive and fun week centered on NMWA’s Art, Books, and Creativity (ABC) curriculum. No prior art experience is necessary. All pre-K through 12th-grade schoolteachers are welcome. Classroom teachers are especially encouraged to apply. $50 materials fee collected upon registration. Participants who successfully complete the institute receive art materials for their classrooms.
Virtual Educator Summer Camp
Monday, July 22 through Friday, July 26, 10–11:30 a.m.
NMWA’s virtual Educator Summer Camp is designed for all educators. Sessions, inspired by the Art, Books, and Creativity (ABC) Institutes and NMWA’s collection, are hands-on, participatory and fun. The Educator Summer Camp explores NMWA’s the museum’s collection and resources, introduces historical and contemporary women artists and engages participants in experimental art-making and close-looking exercises. Guest instructors include artists and educators from around the country. You will receive a recommended supply list, applicable digital resources and a Zoom meeting link in advance of each session. Camp activities are designed to make use of materials and tools that you might have at home and encourage repurposing and seeing everyday objects in a new light. Register for one session or many depending on your interest and commitments. Free. Registration required.
Exhibitions
New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024
April 14–August 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.
New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024 is organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts and sponsored by the museum’s participating outreach committees. The exhibition is made possible by the Clara M. Lovett Emerging Artists Fund and the Sue J. Henry and Carter G. Phillips Exhibition Fund, with additional major support provided by Patti and George White, Share Fund, the Pennsylvania Committee of NMWA and the San Francisco Advocacy for NMWA.
Hung Liu: Making History
Through October 20, 2024
“Weeping” paintings and prints by Hung Liu (1948–2021)—featuring signature paint drips, layers of color, and cultural symbols—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.
Hung Liu: Making History is organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The exhibition is generously supported by Stephanie Sale and the members of NMWA.
Holding Ground: Artists’ Books for the National Museum of Women in the Arts
Through October 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.
Holding Ground: Artists’ Books for the National Museum of Women in the Arts is organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The exhibition is made possible by a generous bequest from Marjorie B. Rachlin.
Impressive: Antoinette Bouzonnet-Stella
Through October 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 (1641–1676) 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.
Impressive: Antoinette Bouzonnet-Stella is organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The exhibition is generously supported by Stephanie Sale and the members of NMWA.
In Focus: Artists at Work
Through October 20, 2024
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, welcoming visitors to the renewed museum, these videos feature Ambreen Butt, Sonya Clark, Colette Fu, the Guerrilla Girls, Graciela Iturbide, Delita Martin, Rania Matar and Alison Saar. The installation’s intimate and immersive design sparks curiosity, inspires advocacy and encourages slow looking during visitors’ exploration of the museum. Dynamic graphic panels include information about each artist and share online resources as well as a map leading to their art on view at NMWA. Presented in two phases, with four artists highlighted in each phase, this series spotlights groundbreaking women artists at work today. For this project, NMWA partnered with Emmy and James Beard award-winning film production company Smartypants and experiential design firm Art Processors to ensure an accessible and enriching experience.
In Focus: Artists at Work is produced by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in collaboration with Smartypants Pictures and Art Processors.
The video series is generously supported by the members of NMWA. Project design is made possible through the generous support of Denise Littlefield Sobel, with additional funding provided by Jamie Gorelick and Richard Waldhorn.
Display screens contributed by Sony Corporation of America.
Remix: The Collection
Ongoing
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.
Remix: The Collection is organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
The exhibition is sponsored by Lugano Diamonds.
Additional funding provided by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sue J. Henry and Carter G. Phillips Exhibition Fund, and the Clara M. Lovett Emerging Artists Fund.
Information
Hours: 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; Closed Mondays and select holidays
Location: 1250 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20005, two blocks north of Metro Center
Admission: $16 for adults, $13 for D.C. residents and visitors 70 and over; free for visitors 21 and under and visitors with disabilities. Beginning May 18, admission is free for active-duty military and their families. Admission is free the first Sunday and second Wednesday of each month.
Information: nmwa.org, 202-783-5000
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