Half of all artists working in the United States are women, yet many of us struggle to name even a few of them. Founded in 1981 as the world’s first museum to exhibit only women’s art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington is working to change that.
“Advocacy is part of our mission,” NMWA Director Susan Fisher Sterling said of the gallery, which reopened in October 2023 after a three-year renovation. “We’re an interesting mix of museum and cause.”
When philanthropist Wilhelmina Cole Holladay opened NMWA more than 40 years ago, work by women artists accounted for only 2% of art in major U.S. galleries.
Over the past decade, 11% of art acquired by major U.S. museums was created by women. And the work of women artists was featured in 14% of major museum exhibitions during the same period.
NMWA’s focus on women artists strives to further increase those numbers. The museum houses over 6,000 pieces by roughly 1,500 women and includes art from the 16th century to today.
The museum includes paintings by well-known U.S. artists like Georgia O’Keefe and Mary Cassatt, along with works by contemporary artists from across the globe.
“What we’re talking about as a core value here is creating a more equitable society,” Sterling said of NMWA’s effort to highlight women artists. “And we see how the United States is working on that, both in the world of private institutions as well as our public institutions.”
The renovation preserved the museum’s exterior while completely overhauling the inside. Wider galleries give visitors more space, and curators have reimagined displays around aesthetic themes rather than chronology.
Highlighting the world’s women artists
In April, the museum will resume its long-standing Women to Watch series, featuring up-and-coming women artists. This year’s show, New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024, will highlight 28 artists from countries including Argentina, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Peru, Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom.
To achieve such broad representation, NMWA enlisted the help of art experts from around the world, who nominated innovative new artists. NMWA curators Orin Zahra and Ginny Treanor selected artists from various regions and asked that the work provided explore visions of the world after recent shifts, including the COVID-19 pandemic and movements for social reform.
The diversity of artists with work on display will allow the exhibition to address complex themes from varying geographic and cultural perspectives, according to NMWA’s website.
Curators hope the show will start conversations about the art on display and invite viewers to reconsider the types of subject matter art can address.
This “group of artists together tells a really interesting story, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle,” Zahra says.
“The beauty of a show like this is you get to bring someone from Asia and someone from the U.S. and someone from Europe and see how they’re tackling these issues through different mediums and different styles in their own way.”
