Art by Women
Celebrate exceptional women artists with exhibitions, stories, videos, and podcast episodes.
Women Artists in the Collection
Explore artworks by the growing number of women artists represented in Mia’s collection. Their genius and creativity are found throughout history and across the world’s diverse cultures. With more than 100,000 artworks, Mia’s collection includes art from six continents, spanning about 7,000 years.
On View Now
Cassatt on Paper
October 19, 2024 – April 8, 2025
One of the leading peintres-graveurs, or painter-printmakers, of late nineteenth-century Paris, Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) applied her painterly skill to a variety of print techniques. Balancing color, line, and texture, she breathed life into intimate scenes of domestic labor and leisure. “Cassatt on Paper” presents highlights from Mia’s collection of prints by Cassatt, offering a rare view into the life and art of this important woman artist.
Mary Sully: Native Modern
March 15, 2025 – September 21, 2025
Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, Mary Sully was a reclusive artist who, between the 1920s and 1940s, created highly distinctive works informed by her Native American and settler ancestry. This first solo exhibition of Sully’s groundbreaking production highlights recent Mia acquisitions, works that complicate traditional notions of Native American and modern art.
Past Exhibitions
Monica Sheets: Das Fundbuero—Civics Lessons
Tia Keobounpheng: Revealing Threads
Marcia Resnick: As It Is or Could Be
Dayanita Singh: Pothi Khana
Parallel Lines: New Textile Masterworks Inspired by Geometry
Jovan C. Speller: Nurturing, and Other Rituals of Protection
Freedom Rising: I Am the Story / L’Merchie Frazier
L’Merchie Frazier is a fiber artist, quilter, historian, innovator, poet, and holographer. This show examines the lives and legacies of African-descended people, including children and their communities across centuries of memory, places, and activism.
Nicole Havekost: Chthonic
Nicole Havekost will explore the simultaneous joy, sublime embarrassment, and disorderly beauty of the human body through her anthropomorphic sculptures.
Unexpected Turns: Women Artists and the Making of American Basket-Weaving Traditions
Intimate Space: A Noblewoman’s Bedroom in Late Imperial China
In the male-dominated society of imperial China, most women were physically restricted to domestic spaces.
Virtual Exhibition
Breaking the Silence: International Women’s Day
“Breaking the Silence” is an observation of International Women’s Day. Participating artists call attention to the daily aggressions, whether physical or psychological, that all women face across the world and in every sector of society. This exhibit critiques the current social system that we live in, which permits and defends these particular inequities. “Breaking the Silence” also honors and supports women who are or have been victims of domestic violence, and recognizes the resilience of cis- and transgender women and non-binary people who work to build more equitable and safe communities for all.
Videos
Podcast Episodes
The Photographer in Hitler's Bath
When World War II begins, Lee Miller is one of the most sought-after women in the world—a celebrated model, an irresistible muse, and an emerging photographer in her own right. So why does she trade the high life for the front line, risking everything to become the only female photojournalist allowed in combat?
The Psychic Sculptor
In 1852, Harriet Hosmer packs her pistol, her anatomy degree, and two pictures of a sculpture she made and moves to Rome. There, among other “emancipated women” in the expat colony, she becomes one of the world’s most famous artists. But it’s the spirit world that truly calls to her, the realm of the dead that she channels through clairvoyance and seances. So what happens when she answers?
The Miracle of Saint Frida
When Frida Kahlo dies in 1954, she’s soon forgotten. And then, suddenly, she seems to be everywhere: on magnets, puzzles, underwear, flip-flops. How did this remarkable artist become an international icon, an emoji, a figure of fervid devotion? And what does she mean to those who believe?
The Animalier
The animalier artists love lions and tigers and bears—anything with teeth and no business being in Paris in the 1800s. No one more than Rosa Bonheur, the smoking, joking, pants-wearing painter who becomes a celebrity, the most famous female artist of her time, by embracing the very things men fear most.
Escape Velocity: The Woman Who Left the World
Leonora Carrington has never felt at home in her wealthy, conservative family. But when she meets the Surrealists in the 1930s and runs from everything she knows, it will take everything she has to become the artist and writer she wants to be. Most importantly: her singular imagination, which reveals the world as both more magical and more haunted than most of us care to admit.
You can see her feminist take on Surrealism in this painting from Mia’s collection.
Hiding in Plain Sight: The O’Keeffe We Never Knew
In the 1970s, Georgia O’Keeffe is supposedly the hermit savant of the New Mexico badlands, rarely heard and seldom seen, even as the outside world can’t get enough of her enigmatic art. But when curators, journalists, and even the FBI come calling, it seems the head ghost of Ghost Ranch is the host with the most—and hardly ever alone. A fresh look at a myth we can’t stop believing.
You can see O’Keeffe’s work, including one of the badlands pictures, “Black Place I,” in Mia’s collection.