Fall Arts Preview: Visual Arts
By • September 9, 2025 0 644
State Fairs: Growing American Craft
Renwick Gallery
Through Sept. 7, 2026
The first exhibition of its kind, “State Fairs: Growing American Craft,” curated by Mary Savig, the Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator-in-Charge for the Renwick Gallery, displays over 240 artworks from the mid-19th century to the present. Among the highlights: the size-96 boots of Big Tex from the State Fair of Texas, flanking the Renwick’s entrance; a life-size butter cow, created on-site by Iowa State Fair official butter sculptor Sarah Pratt; a pyramid of more than 700 glass jars of preserved fruits and vegetables by “canning superstar” Rod Zeitler; and, in the Grand Salon, “Capilla de Maiz (Maize Chapel),” a site-specific installation by Justin Favela. Artists and 4-H clubs from 43 states and tribal nations are represented, with all 50 states represented in a photo gallery. Each gallery considers personal stories of craft found in different areas of the fairgrounds, from the art exhibits and heritage villages to the parades, dairy barns and rodeos.
Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985
National Gallery of Art
Sept. 21, 2025 – Jan. 11, 2026
“Drum cover girl Erlin Ibreck, Kilburn, London,” 1966. James Barnor. Courtesy NGA.
Photography was central to the Black Arts Movement, a cultural and aesthetic movement of the 1960s and ’70s that celebrated Black history, identity and beauty. Besides photographers, its artistic contributors included visual artists, poets, playwrights, musicians and filmmakers. Displaying 150 works by such artists as Billy Abernathy, Romare Bearden, Kwame Brathwaite, Roy DeCarava, Doris Derby, Emory Douglas, Barkley Hendricks, Barbara McCullough, Betye Saar and Ming Smith, the presentation traces the Black Arts Movement from its roots to its lingering impacts. Curated by Philip Brookman, the National Gallery’s consulting curator of photographs, and Deborah Willis, university professor at New York University, where she directs the Center for Black Visual Culture and chairs the photography and imaging department at Tisch School of the Arts, the show will travel to the Getty Museum and the Mississippi Museum of Art in 2026.
Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Sept. 26, 2025 – Jan. 11, 2026
“Self-Portrait,” c. 1630. Judith Leyster. Courtesy NMWA.
Whether their work was circulated by aristocrats, commissioned by patrons or sold on the open market, women artists molded the world around them in what were known as the Low Countries in the 17th and early 18th centuries. “Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750” showcases paintings, lace, prints, paper cuttings, embroidery and sculpture by more than 40 artists from the areas of present-day Flanders, in Belgium, and the Netherlands — from celebrated painters such as Gesina ter Borch, Judith Leyster and Clara Peeters to unsung women who toiled making exquisite lace. Drawing on recent scholarship, this thematic presentation considers how status, family and social expectations influenced a woman artist’s training and career choices and shows how women of all classes were part of an artistic economy buoyed by patrons (some of them women) enriched by colonial exploitation and the slave trade.
Anonymous Was a Woman
The Kreeger Museum
Oct. 16 – Dec. 31, 2025
“I Trust My Third Eye,” 2025. Renée Stout. Courtesy of Marc Straus Gallery/Artist.
This presentation of work by Jae Ko, linn meyers, Joyce J. Scott and Renée Stout dovetails with the 2025 group exhibition “Anonymous Was a Woman: The First 25 Years,” curated by Nancy Princenthal and Vesela Sretenović for New York University’s Grey Art Museum. Named for a phrase from Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own,” the Anonymous Was a Woman grant program for midcareer women artists was established in 1996 by philanthropist and artist Susan Unterberg. The Kreeger exhibition, curated by Sretenović, focuses on recent work by four DMV-based grantees. Ko, a 2012 grant recipient, was born in South Korea and lives and works in Alexandria, Virginia, and Piney Point, Maryland. A 2023 recipient, meyers was born in D.C. and lives and works here and in New York and L.A. Born in Baltimore, where she lives and works, Scott was a 1997 recipient. A 1999 recipient, the Kansas-born Stout lives and works in D.C.
The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art
National Gallery of Art
Oct. 18, 2025 – March 1, 2026
“The Stars We Do Not See” offers a rare opportunity to experience some of the most significant examples of modern and contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. The 200-plus works on view, drawn exclusively from the collection of Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, were created by more than 130 artists. Among them: trailblazing Anmatyerre painter Emily Kam Kngwarray; senior Yolŋu artist Gulumbu Yunupiŋu, known as “Star Lady,” whose works inspired the exhibition title; and contemporary innovators Brook Andrew, Destiny Deacon and Betty Muffler. Curated by Australian Centre for Contemporary Art Artistic Director and CEO Myles Russell-Cook, former senior curator of Australian and First Nations art at the National Gallery of Victoria, the exhibition presents Australian Indigenous art in all its forms, from ochre bark paintings and experimental weavings to photographs and works of immersive sound and video.
Water’s Edge: The Art of Truman Lowe
National Museum of the American Indian
Oct. 24, 2025 – Jan. 2027
“Mimi,” 1979. Truman Lowe. Courtesy NMAI.
“Water’s Edge: The Art of Truman Lowe” is the first major retrospective of the late Hoocąk (Ho-Chunk) artist and former National Museum of the American Indian curator of contemporary art, who was born on a Wisconsin reservation in 1944 and died in 2019. Lowe’s elegant, minimalist sculptures made of willow branches, feathers and other organic materials evoke the rivers, streams and waterfalls of the woodlands where he was raised and the canoes used to traverse them. His sculptures and sensitively rendered pastel and charcoal drawings reflect on cultural traditions, memory and human relationships to place. “Water’s Edge” features nearly 50 of Lowe’s sculptures, drawings and paintings that explore the evolution of and themes within the artist’s work throughout his career. The exhibition brings to light rarely seen monumental works from public and private collections, including more than two dozen from the NMAI’s holdings.
Korean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared
National Museum of Asian Art
Nov. 8, 2025 – Feb. 1, 2026
“Korean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared” presents a selection of masterpieces donated to the Korean nation by the family of Lee Kun-hee, the late chairman of Samsung Group, who died in 2020. Spanning ancient times to the present, the objects on view were originally created for a range of settings, including royal palaces, Buddhist temples, Confucian academies, scholars’ studios and modern art spaces. Together, they trace the evolution of Korean innovation, revealing shifts in style, power, belief and technology over time. The voices of those who made, used and collected paintings and objects are displayed through letters, inscriptions and dedications, offering glimpses into their lives and insights into the meanings these objects held before and now. The exhibition will travel to Chicago and London following its premiere in Washington, D.C., where its presentation is supplemented by loans from the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul.
Also of note …
Women Artists of the DMV
American University Museum and 15 other venues
Through Dec. 7 (ends elsewhere on different dates)
Showing art by over 60 participants, the AU Museum is the central hub for this 16-venue survey curated by Lenny Campello. The mammoth exhibition, featuring hundreds of women artists, is timed to coincide with the university’s biennial Feminist Art History Conference (Sept. 26 to 28).
Material Witness
The Rubell Museum
Through Fall 2026
Works by 30 contemporary artists using nontraditional materials and processes — squid ink, Coca-Cola, ostrich eggs, anointing oil, lipstick, discarded metal and animal hides — are on view in more than 20 galleries on the museum’s three floors. Also: “Basil Kincaid: Spirit in the Gift.”
