A landmark exhibition makes its way to Washington, D.C., proving that women didn’t just participate in abstract art—they transformed it.
WASHINGTON—For decades, the story of abstract art has been told through a narrow lens. You know the names: Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning. The narrative, long dominated by men, painted abstraction as a masculine pursuit of heroic gestures and grand statements.
But a groundbreaking exhibition now on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts is rewriting that history—and it’s about time.
Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection brings together 80 works by 69 women artists spanning nearly eight decades, from 1946 to 2024. It’s one of the largest exhibitions ever mounted to survey women in abstraction, and its arrival in Washington marks a significant moment: the first time this acclaimed collection has been shown within a women-focused institution.
If you haven’t made plans to visit NMWA between now and July 26, consider this your invitation to witness something extraordinary.
Photographer: Tom Powell Imaging An image of an abstract painting featuring layers of colorful ink in shades of red, orange, purple, yellow, and blue, overlaid with black curving lines.
Photographer: Pratik Parulekar
A photo of a sculpture of an abstract figure. The figure’s body is solid dark wood with no defining features. The head is carved with facial features including lips, ears, a nose, and two white eyes. A necklace made of small beads and larger open circles hands from the figure’s neck.
A Collection Built With Purpose
The works on view come from the personal collection of Komal Shah and her husband, Gaurav Garg. Shah, a former tech executive who turned her attention to philanthropy in 2008, began building the collection with a clear vision: championing contemporary art by women. By 2014, that vision had solidified into a focused mission that now culminates in this stunning survey.
Curated by Cecilia Alemani—the visionary behind the 2022 Venice Biennale—the exhibition is organized into seven thematic sections that invite visitors to move freely across mediums, eras, and approaches. Paintings hang alongside textiles. Ceramics converse with sculpture. Mixed-media works challenge easy categorization.
It’s a deliberate choice. Because abstraction, these artists remind us, has never been one thing.
Photographer: Ian Reeves
An image of an abstract painting. The foreground features five bowling-pin shaped forms, painted with abstract blue, red, pink, yellow, black, and white patterns. The background features abstract yellow and green curvilinear forms over a black and white chevron pattern
Threads, Clay, and Radical Reclamation
Walk into the “Craft is Art” section, and you’ll understand immediately why this exhibition matters. Here, Magdalena Abakanowicz’s monumental fiber works and Sheila Hicks’ vibrant textiles command the same reverence as any painting on canvas. Eight vessels by ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu sit alongside them—each one a meditation on form that blends Abstract Expressionist bravado with the quiet contemplation of Japanese pottery.
The message is clear: the distinction between “art” and “craft” has always been arbitrary, and often gendered. These artists didn’t wait for permission to blur those lines. They simply erased them.
In “Disobedient Bodies,” artists like Maria Lassnig and Wangechi Mutu complicate portraiture by refusing to play by the rules. Joan Semmel’s Horizons (1981) offers a radical perspective on the nude—one that aligns abstraction with figuration on its own terms. These aren’t bodies rendered for someone else’s gaze. They’re bodies as experienced from within.
Gestures, Light, and Hidden Histories
The section devoted to gestural abstraction traces the visual vocabulary of postwar art—and corrects the record in the process. Among the highlights: a soaring 12-foot-wide diptych by Joan Mitchell, one of her final works, demonstrating the intensity and scale that defined her late career.
But perhaps the most revelatory moment comes earlier. Janet Sobel’s 1946 painting—the oldest work in the show—employs drip techniques and “allover” composition years before Jackson Pollock made them famous. The history books have some catching up to do.
Elsewhere, “Luminous Abstraction” celebrates painters working in the traditions of Color Field and California Light and Space, while “Of Selves and Spirits” delves into myth and hidden history. Firelei Báez’s For Améthyste and Athénaire reclaims stories of Afro-Caribbean women with a visual language all her own. Françoise Grossen’s monumental 1977 sculpture, made entirely of orange fishing rope, twists through space like a chain of interconnected figures—impossible to ignore, impossible to categorize.
Photographer: Ian Reeves
An image of a painting of a map of the United States of America. The is depicted vertically, turned ninety degrees from a standard map representation. Each state is painted with a different color or pattern. The background features green, grey, blue, yellow, black, and white patterns.
Abstraction as Activism
In “The Power of Form,” abstraction becomes a strategy of revelation. Jenny Holzer’s TOP SECRET ENDGAME (2019) uses massive black censored blocks to expose how institutional power hides in plain sight. Joyce J. Scott’s intricate beadwork confronts complex social narratives with devastating precision. These works prove that abstraction isn’t an escape from politics—it’s a way of engaging with them on new terms.
The final section, “Pixelated Abstraction,” draws lines between fiber art’s piecework traditions and contemporary digital practices. Faith Ringgold’s quilts echo in the fractured surfaces of paintings by Anicka Yi and Charline von Heyl. Sarah Sze’s Crisscross (2021) suggests a shattered screen or a kaleidoscopic glitch—abstraction for a fragmented age.
Photographer: Ian Reeves
An image of a mixed-media work featuring two abstract female figures with medium skin-tone against a yellow background. The figure on the left is smaller and wears a white dress and green shoes. The larger figure on the right wears a red shirt and red shoes.
Plan Your Visit
Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection runs through July 26 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, located at 1250 New York Avenue, NW in Washington, D.C. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Mondays and select holidays.
A series of artist talks and workshops will accompany the exhibition, with details to be announced in the coming months. And if you want to dive deeper, the 400-page exhibition catalogue—featuring essays by leading scholars and reflections from 15 prominent artists—is well worth seeking out.
An image of a woven textile artwork. Colorful geometric shapes combine with lines to form intersecting geometric patterns, creating a pixelated effect.
Why This Exhibition Matters Now
This show arrives at a moment when conversations about representation, equity, and who gets to shape art history have never been more urgent. The numbers are stark: women artists remain dramatically underrepresented in public collections and major exhibitions worldwide.
But Making Their Mark isn’t a corrective born of frustration. It’s a celebration—joyful, expansive, and long overdue. Walking through these galleries, you don’t just learn about women artists who should have been celebrated all along. You discover connections across generations, mediums, and approaches that reveal abstraction as the vibrant, contested, and endlessly inventive field it has always been.
The Shah Garg Collection, with its deliberate focus on women artists, offers a model for what collecting can look like when it’s guided by purpose. And the National Museum of Women in the Arts—the first museum in the world dedicated to championing women through art—provides the perfect setting for this work to be seen, discussed, and celebrated.
Washington is a city of monuments, most of them commemorating men who shaped the nation through politics and power. But this spring and summer, one of the most important monuments on display isn’t made of marble or bronze. It’s made of paint, thread, clay, and vision—80 works by 69 artists who refused to wait for history to notice them.
They made their mark anyway. Now it’s your turn to see it.
Photographer: Brian Buckley
An image of an abstract painting featuring bold brushstrokes and drips of varying thickness in shades of yellow, green, purple, and blue against a white background. The painting is a diptych, with brushstrokes across two canvases.
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