The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), located in Washington, D.C., is "the first museum in the world solely dedicated" to championing women through the arts. NMWA was incorporated in 1981 by Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay. Since opening in 1987, the museum has acquired a collection of more than 6,000 works by more than 1,000 artists, ranging from the 16th century to today. The collection includes works by Frida Kahlo, Mary Cassatt, Alma Woodsey Thomas, Élisabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun, and Amy Sherald. NMWA also holds the only painting by Frida Kahlo in Washington, D.C.

The museum occupies an old Masonic Temple, a building listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. As of August 2021, the museum is temporarily closed as it undergoes a $66 million transformative renovation. The museum will reopen to the public on October 21, 2023.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Museum_of_Women_in_the_Arts

 

Alma Woodsey Thomas
(1891 - 1978)
 

Alma Woodsey Thomas was an African-American artist and teacher who lived and worked in Washington, D.C., and is now recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century. Thomas is best known for the "exuberant", colorful, abstract paintings that she created after her retirement from a 35-year career teaching art at Washington's Shaw Junior High School.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_Thomas

Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses
1969
Acrylic on canvas
152,5 x 127 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/iris-tulips-jonquils-and-crocuses/

 Maria Helena Vieira da Silva
(1908 - 1992)

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva  was a Portuguese abstract painter. She was considered a leading member of the European abstract expressionism movement known as Art Informel. Her works feature complex interiors and city views using lines that explore space and perspective. She also worked in tapestry and stained glass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Helena_Vieira_da_Silva

The Town
1955
Oil on canvas
99,5 x 80 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/town/

Remedios Varo
(1908 - 1963)

María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga was a Spanish-born Mexican surrealist artist working in Spain, France, and Mexico. 

 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedios_Varo

La llamada (The Call)
1961
Oil on Masonite
106,6 x 78,7 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/la-llamada-call/

Mildred Thompson
(1936 - 2003)

Mildred Jean Thompson was an American artist who worked in painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and photography. Critics have related her art to West African textiles and Islamic architecture; they have also cited German Expressionism, music (both American jazz and classical European) and Thompson's readings in astronomy, spiritualism and metaphysics as important artistic influences. She also wrote and was an associate editor for the magazine Art Papers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildred_Thompson

Magnetic Fields
1990
Oil on canvas
157,5 x 122 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/magnetic-fields/

 Céline Marie Tabary
(1908 - 1993)

Céline Marie Tabary  was an artist and arts professor at Howard University who championed African-American art in 1940s Washington, D.C. She emigrated from France in 1938, teaching and working in Washington, D.C. through the 1950s, before returning to France. Tabary won the Landscape Prize in 1944 from the National Museum, Washington, D.C.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Céline_Marie_Tabary

Terrasse de café Paris
1950
Oil on canvas
32 x 39 in
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/terrasse-de-cafe-paris/

Sophie Taeuber
(1889 - 1943)

Sophie Henriette Gertrud Taeuber-Arp was a Swiss artist, painter, sculptor, textile designer, furniture and interior designer, architect, and dancer. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Taeuber-Arp

Composition of Circles and Semicircles
1935
Gouache on paper
25,4 x 34 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/composition-circles-and-semicircles/

Hollis Sigler
(1948 - 2001)

Hollis Sigler (1948–2001) was an openly lesbian Chicago-based artist. She died of breast cancer on March 29, 2001, at the age of 53. She received several Arts Lifetime Achievement awards as both an artist and an educator, including the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association in 2001.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollis_Sigler

To Kiss The Spirits: Now This Is What It Is Really Like
1993
Oil on canvas with painted frame
167,6 x 167,6 x 7,6 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/kiss-spirits-now-what-it-really/

Daniela Rossell

(b. 1973)

 

Daniela Rossell is a Mexican photographer best known for her portraits of the privileged Mexican elite, of which she herself is a member. Her best-known photographic work was published in 2002 under the title Ricas y Famosas, which is a photographic series portraying upper-class Mexican women, many whom had connections to the PRI Institutional Revolutionary Party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniela_Rossell

 

Medusa (Ricas y Famosas)

1999

Chromogenic color print

152,4 x 127 cm.

NMWA

https://nmwa.org/art/collection/medusa-series-ricas-y-famosas/

 Elena Presser
(b. 1940)
 

Elena Presser is an Argentine artist who focuses on keyboard pieces, specifically on Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations. Her artwork is her interpretation of classical music and is defined with shapes and symbols within her artwork. She also includes religious notions affiliated with the high quality of music. She also believes that music is unique to everyone, therefore she decides to primarily include it in her art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_Presser

Unfinished Symphony
1982
Paper, pastel, pencil, silk thread, silk ribbon, wire
73,6 x 91,4 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/unfinished-symphony/

Gabriele Münter
(1877 - 1962)

Gabriele Münter was a German expressionist painter who was at the forefront of the Munich avant-garde in the early 20th century. She studied and lived with the painter Wassily Kandinsky and was a founding member of the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriele_Münter

 

Breakfast of the Birds
1934
Oil on board
45,7 x 55,2 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/breakfast-birds/

Georgia Mills Jessup<
(1926 - 2016)

<i>Georgia Mills Jessup was an American painter, sculptor, ceramicist, muralist, and collage artist. </I>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Mills_Jessup

Rainy Night, Downtown
1967
Oil on Canvas
111,7 x 122 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/rainy-night-downtown/

 Loïs Mailou Jones
(1905 - 1998)

Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1998) was an artist and educator. Her work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Muscarelle Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection. She is often associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_Mailou_Jones

Ode to Kinshasa
1972
Mixed media on canvas
122 x 91,5 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/ode-kinshasa/

Lotte Laserstein
(1898 - 1993)

Lotte Laserstein was a German-Swedish painter. She was an artist of figurative paintings in Germany's Weimar Republic. The National Socialist regime and its anti-Semitism forced her to leave Germany in 1937 and to emigrate to Sweden. In Sweden, she continued to work as a portraitist and painter of landscapes until her death. The paintings she created during the 1920s and 1930s fit into the movement of New Objectivity in Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotte_Laserstein

Morning Toilette
1930
Oil on panel
99,5 x 65 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/morning-toilette/

Lee Krasner
(1908 - 1984)

Lenore "Lee" Krasner (born Lena Krassner) was an American abstract expressionist painter, with a strong speciality in collage. She was married to Jackson Pollock. Although there was much cross-pollination between their two styles, the relationship somewhat overshadowed her contribution for some time. Krasner's training, influenced by George Bridgman and Hans Hofmann, was the more formalized, especially in the depiction of human anatomy, and this enriched Pollock's more intuitive and unstructured output.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Krasner

The Springs
1964
Oil on canvas,
109,2 x 167,6 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/springs/

Käthe Kollwitz
(1867 - 1945)

Käthe Kollwitz born as Schmidt) was a German artist who worked with painting, printmaking (including etching, lithography and woodcuts) and sculpture. Her most famous art cycles, including The Weavers and The Peasant War, depict the effects of poverty, hunger and war on the working class. Despite the realism of her early works, her art is now more closely associated with Expressionism. Kollwitz was the first woman not only to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts but also to receive honorary professor status.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Käthe_Kollwitz

The Downtrodden
1900
Etching and aquatint on paper
30,8 x 27,7 cm
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/downtrodden/

Emily Kame Kngwarreye
(1910 - 1996)
 

Emily Kame Kngwarreye (or Emily Kam Ngwarray) was an Aboriginal Australian artist from the Utopia community in the Northern Territory.
She is one of the most prominent and successful artists in the history of Australian art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Kame_Kngwarreye

Yam Story '96
1996
Acrylic on canvas
121,6 x 91,5 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/yam-story-96/

 Frida Kahlo
(1907 - 1954)

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist. She is known for painting about her experience of chronic pain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo

Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky
1937
Oil on Masonite
76 x 61 cm.
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/self-portrait-dedicated-leon-trotsky/

Graciela Iturbide
(b. 1942)

Graciela Iturbide is a Mexican photographer. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and is included in many major museum collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The J. Paul Getty Museum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graciela_Iturbide

Cuatro Pescaditos, Juchitan, Oaxaca,
1986 (Later print not dated)
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/cuatro-pescaditos-juchitan-oaxaca-mexico/

Hannah Höch
(1889 - 1978)

 

Hannah Höch was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage. Photomontage, or fotomontage, is a type of collage in which the pasted items are actual photographs, or photographic reproductions pulled from the press and other widely produced media.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Höch

In Front of a Red Evening Sun
Oil on canvas,
80,6 x 75 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/front-red-evening-sun/

Lalla A. Essaydi
(b. 1956)

Lalla A. Essaydi is a Moroccan photographer known for her staged photographs of Arab women in contemporary art. She currently works in Boston, Massachusetts, and Morocco. Her current residence is in New York.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalla_Essaydi

Bullets Revisited #3
2012
Three chromogenic prints mounted on aluminum
167,6 x 381 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/bullets-revisited-3/

 Elaine de kooning

(1918 - 1989)

 

Elaine Marie Catherine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She wrote extensively on the art of the period and was an editorial associate for Art News magazine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_de_Kooning

 

Bacchus #3

1978

Acrylic and charcoal on canvas

78 x 50 x 2 1/4 in.

NMWA

https://nmwa.org/art/collection/bacchus-3/

 Sonia Delaunay

(1885 - 1979)

 

Sonia Delaunay was a French artist, who spent most of her working life in Paris. She was born in Odessa (then part of Russian Empire), and formally trained in Russian Empire and Germany before moving to France and expanding her practice to include textile, fashion, and set design. She co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes, with her husband Robert Delaunay and others. She was the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in 1964, and in 1975 was named an officer of the French Legion of Honor.

Her work in modern design included the concepts of geometric abstraction, and the integration of furniture, fabrics, wall coverings, and clothing into her art practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Delaunay

Untitled

ca. 1970

Etching and aquatint on paper

66 x 50 cm

NMWA

https://nmwa.org/art/collection/delaunay-untitled/

Leonora Carrington
(1917 - 2011)

 

Mary Leonora Carrington OBE was a British-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the women's liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonora_Carrington

 

Samhain Skin
1975
Gouache on vellum
120,3 x 82,2 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/samhain-skin/

Lilla Cabot Perry
(1564 – 1635)
 

Lilla Cabot Perry (born Lydia Cabot; January 13, 1848 – February 28, 1933) was an American artist who worked in the American Impressionist style, rendering portraits and landscapes in the free form manner of her mentor, Claude Monet. Perry was an early advocate of the French Impressionist style and contributed to its reception in the United States. Perry's early work was shaped by her exposure to the Boston School of artists and her travels in Europe and Japan. She was also greatly influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophies and her friendship with Camille Pissarro. Although it was not until the age of thirty-six that Perry received formal training, her work with artists of the Impressionist, Realist, Symbolist, and German Social Realist movements greatly affected the style of her oeuvre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilla_Cabot_Perry

Lady With a Bowl of Violets
1910
Oil on canvas
102 x 76 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/lady-bowl-violets/

Isabel Bishop
(1902 - 1988)

Isabel Bishop was an American painter and graphic artist. Bishop studied under Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League of New York, where she would later become an instructor. She was most notable for her scenes of everyday life in Manhattan, as a member of the loosely-defined ‘Fourteenth Street School’ of artists, grouped in that precinct. Union Square features prominently in her work, which mainly depicts female figures. Bishop’s paintings won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, among other distinctions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Bishop

Little Nude
1964
Etching and aquatint on paper
27,6 x 23,5 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/little-nude/

Grace Arnold Albee
(1890 - 1985)

Grace Thurston Arnold Albee was an American printmaker and wood engraver. During her sixty-year career life, she created more than two hundred and fifty prints from linocuts, woodcuts, and wood engravings. She received over fifty awards and has her works in thirty-three museum collections. She was the first female graphic artist to receive full membership to the National Academy of Design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Albee

Manhattan Backwash
1938
Wood engraving on paper
9 x 15 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/manhattan-backwash/

 Alice Bailly

(1872 - 1938)

 

Alice Bailly was a Swiss avant-garde painter, known for her interpretations on cubism, fauvism, futurism, her wool paintings, and her participation in the Dada movement. In 1906, Bailly had settled in Paris where she befriended Juan Gris, Francis Picabia, and Marie Laurencin, avant-garde modernist painters who influenced her works and her later life.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Bailly

 

Self-Portrait

1917

Oil on canvas

81 x 58,4 cm

NMWA

https://nmwa.org/art/collection/self-portrait/

Anni Albers
(1899 - 1994)
 

Anni Albers (born Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann; June 12, 1899 – May 9, 1994) was a German textile artist and printmaker credited with blurring the lines between traditional craft and art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anni_Albers

Untitled
1969
Serigraph on paper
61 x 57 cm
NMWA
https://nmwa.org/art/collection/albers-untitled/