National Museum of Women in the Arts

Stand on the corner for a moment and listen. Traffic hums along New York Avenue, a bus sighs at the curb, and office workers pass with coffee in hand. Above you rises a heavy building of pale stone, with tall arched windows and a sturdy, formal face. It looks like a bank, or perhaps a courthouse. It is neither. Behind these walls is a museum built around a simple question that turned out to be a radical one.

This is the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in downtown Washington, D.C. Its mission is to champion women artists, past and present, and to give their work the space and attention it was so often denied. When it opened its doors in 1987, it was among the first major museums anywhere devoted to that purpose. Today it holds paintings, sculpture, photographs, and artists' books spanning roughly five centuries.

The building came first, long before the museum. It was completed in the early twentieth century as a Masonic Temple — a meeting hall for the Freemasons, a fraternal society with its own rituals and symbols. The architect was Waddy Butler Wood, who designed several important buildings in the capital. So there is a quiet irony here. A building raised for an organization that admitted only men now serves as a home for women's art.

The museum itself grew out of a private collection and a moment of surprise. Wilhelmina Cole Holladay and her husband, Wallace Holladay, were collectors. On a trip to Europe in the 1970s, they admired still-life paintings by Clara Peeters, a Flemish artist of the early seventeenth century. Back home, Wilhelmina looked for Peeters in a standard art history textbook. She found nothing. In fact, that widely used book included almost no women artists at all.

That gap became a project. The Holladays began collecting work by women, searching for artists that history had overlooked. Over the years, the collection grew too large for a private home. In the early 1980s, they founded the museum, and they bought this old Masonic Temple to house it. It took years of renovation and fundraising before the galleries opened. Wilhelmina Holladay led the institution for decades and remained its driving force.

Now step inside, and notice the change in sound. The street noise drops away. The main hall is tall and formal, with polished stone, warm light, and a grand staircase that curves upward. Most visitors pause here and look up. This space was built for ceremony, and it still feels ceremonial. Today it often hosts events, and the staircase gives you a view down into the hall from the upper levels.

Here is something many visitors miss. The museum recently went through a major renovation. It closed in 2021 and reopened in the autumn of 2023. The work modernized the galleries, the climate systems, and access throughout the building. So although the stone walls are more than a century old, much of what surrounds the art is new. If you visited years ago, you may find the layout feels lighter and easier to follow.

Begin with the oldest works, and look for the Renaissance and Baroque painters. Lavinia Fontana, an Italian artist of the sixteenth century, built a successful career painting portraits in Bologna and later in Rome. She is often described as one of the first women to work as a professional painter on the same footing as men. Her portraits carry fine detail in lace, jewels, and fabric. Look closely at the hands and the textures of cloth.

Then find the still lifes, and Clara Peeters, the artist who started it all. Her tables hold fish, bread, cheese, flowers, and gleaming metal cups. Here is the second surprise. In some of her paintings, Peeters added tiny reflections of herself on the curved surfaces of goblets and pewter. They are so small that most people walk right past them. It was a quiet signature, a way of saying: I was here, and I made this.

Move forward in time and the names may feel more familiar. The collection includes works by Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, two painters connected with Impressionism, the late nineteenth-century movement that captured light and everyday life in quick, loose brushwork. One of the most visited pieces is a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter known for her direct gaze and vivid colour. She dedicated it to the revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Stand in front of it and meet her eyes.

The modern and contemporary galleries open the story wider. Here you may find work by Alma Thomas, a Washington artist who became known for paintings built from bright, rhythmic blocks of colour. You will also meet sculpture, photography, and installations by living artists from many countries. The museum also has a strong collection of artists' books — objects where the page, the binding, and the image work together as art. These are easy to overlook, so look for them.

As you walk, you may notice a feeling that is hard to name at first. In most large museums, women artists appear only now and then, among many rooms of work by men. Here the balance is reversed. Every name on every label belongs to a woman. For some visitors, this changes how they look at art history itself. It raises a simple question: how many other artists were left out of the books, and why?

When you leave, pause on the steps or across the street and look back at the facade. Remember that it was built for men's meetings, behind closed doors. Now the doors open to anyone curious enough to walk in. The traffic will still be humming. The office workers will still be passing with their coffee. But you may carry one small image with you — a tiny face, painted on the curve of a silver cup, waiting four centuries for someone to notice.