Spring Arts Preview: Visual Arts
By • February 10, 2026 0 352
The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today
National Portrait Gallery
Through Aug. 30
The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today
More than 3,300 paintings, photographs, sculptures and time-based media installations were entered in the National Portrait Gallery’s most recent Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Now on view, “The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today,” exhibits the three winning works and 31 other portraits that made the final round, created by artists from a dozen states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The top prize — $25,000 and a commission for a portrait of a living individual for the gallery’s permanent collection — went to New Yorker Kameron Neal for his two-channel video “Down the Barrel (of a Lens),” incorporating New York Police Department surveillance footage. The portrait that receives the most in-person and online votes by April 5 will receive the People’s Choice Award.
The Magical World of Joan Danziger
Ravens: Spirits of the Sky
American University Museum
Through May 17
“Ocean Sky Raven,” 2022. Joan Danziger. Courtesy AU Museum.
Two of the five spring exhibitions at the American University Museum, both curated by Director Jack Rasmussen, feature works by abstract painter and surrealist sculptor Joan Danziger, 91, who has resided in Washington, D.C., since 1968. The 40 mixed-media sculptures — including 21 beetles — in “The Magical World of Joan Danziger,” made from wire, glass and CelluClay, “emerge from a deep fascination with metamorphosis, myth and the thresholds between humans and animals” (her words). Complementing that show, Danziger’s largest to date, which also includes paintings and drawings, is “Ravens: Spirits of the Sky,” in which scale and positioning heighten the mythic resonance of her glass sculptures of the birds, inviting viewers to encounter them as enigmatic beings.
Mary Cassatt: An American in Paris
Feb. 14 to Aug. 30
National Gallery of Art
“Little Girl in a Blue Armchair,” 1878. Mary Cassatt. Courtesy NGA.
Marking 100 years since the death of the Pennsylvania-born artist who participated in four of the eight Impressionist exhibitions, including the first in 1879, “Mary Cassatt: An American in Paris” is an intimate, three-gallery display of some 40 paintings, drawings and prints, largely drawn from the National Gallery of Art’s extensive holdings of her work (five of the museum’s Cassatt paintings were newly cleaned and studied). Preparatory drawings, multiple states and unique proofs will offer keys to her infrequently exhibited color prints, inspired by an 1890 exhibition of Japanese woodcuts in Paris. During “An American in Paris,” an installation of archival photographs, rare catalogs and documentation, including Cassatt’s correspondence, will be on view in the National Gallery of Art Library.
Adorning the Horse: Equestrian Textiles for Power and Prestige
The GWU Museum and the Textile Museum
Feb. 21 to June 20
Horse cover, Japan, Meiji Period (1868-1912). Courtesy GWU/Textile Museum.
Coinciding with the Lunar Year of the Horse, “Adorning the Horse” will feature a selection of intricately designed and woven horse covers, saddle blankets and other equestrian textiles from the past 1,300 years. Civilizations from Türkiye to Japan have elaborately costumed these prized animals, whose beauty, strength and majesty have captivated humans for millennia. Among the objects to be displayed, from a collection donated by former Textile Museum trustee Judy Brick Freedman and Allen R. Freedman, are a 5th-to-7th-century Central Asian horse cover, late 19th-century/early 20th-century horse covers from Uzbekistan and Japan, a saddle cover from Iran dating to the early 19th-century and another from Azerbaijan dating to the second half of the 19th-century.
Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Feb. 27 to July 26
“Malcom X #17,” 2016. Barbara Chase-Riboud. Courtesy NMWA.
Drawn entirely from the contemporary art collection of Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg, “Making Their Mark” — curated by Cecilia Alemani, director and chief curator of High Line Arts — illustrates women artists’ vital role in abstraction. Juxtaposing contemporary works with their historical antecedents, the exhibition also bridges personal and political narratives and generational and geographic divides. “Making Their Mark” brings together some 80 sculptures, paintings, textiles, ceramics, prints and mixed-media works created since 1946. Featured artists include: Magdalena Abakanowicz, Cecily Brown, Sheila Hicks, Jenny Holzer, Julie Mehretu, Joan Mitchell, Faith Ringgold, Tschabalala Self, Amy Sillman, Lorna Simpson, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Pat Steir, Sarah Sze, Kara Walker and Zarina.
Miró and the United States
The Phillips Collection
March 21 to July 5
“Femme et oiseaux au lever du soleil (Woman and Birds at Sunrise),” 1946. Courtesy Phillips Collection.
In the three decades after his 1941 MoMA retrospective (there was a second in 1959), Joan Miró visited the U.S. seven times, meeting American artists in their studios, collaborating on prints and architectural projects and closely following museum and gallery exhibitions. Featuring 75 works by more than 30 artists, “Miró and the United States” shows how those interactions influenced postwar art’s development on both sides of the Atlantic. This exhibition, co-organized with the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, reframes the Catalan artist’s legacy, revealing how his dreamlike pictures evolved through artistic dialogue and experimentation with American counterparts such as Alexander Calder, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Norman Lewis, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler and Adolph Gottlieb.
Also of note …
Ties of Our Common Kindred
Glenstone
Opening Feb. 12
“January 1st,” 1956. Willem de Kooning. Courtesy Glenstone.
To mark the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Potomac, Maryland, museum will display works by Ruth Asawa, Willem de Kooning, Kerry James Marshall, Jackson Pollock, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol and other 20th-century American artists.
On Time: Giving Form to the Fleeting
Hillwood Estate, Museum and Garden
Feb. 14 to June 14
Clock, French, maker unknown, 1785. Courtesy Hillwood.
Clock, French, maker unknown, 1785. Courtesy Hillwood.
Beginning with examples from antiquity and the Renaissance and concluding with sections on digital clocks, traditional watchmaking and horology in contemporary art, “On Time” will showcase Hillwood’s collection of lavish timepieces, supplemented with loaned objects.
