Featured Current Exhibition
Suchitra Mattai: Myth from Matter
All Current Exhibitions
Remix: The Collection
Oct 21, 2023, to Oct 21, 2025Remix 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.
In Focus: Artists at Work
Oct 21, 2023, to Apr 20, 2025Enjoy 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.
Impressive: Antoinette Bouzonnet-Stella
Oct 21, 2023, to Oct 20, 2024The 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.
Holding Ground: Artists’ Books for the National Museum of Women in the Arts
Oct 21, 2023, to Oct 20, 2024Nine 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.
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.