Art by Women
Celebrate the exceptional historical, creative, and cultural contributions made by women artists with exhibitions, virtual events, stories, videos, and podcast episodes.
Women Artists in the Collection
Take a virtual visit to Mia, exploring exceptional creative contributions made by women artists throughout history to present and across the world’s diverse cultures. With over 90,000 artworks, Mia’s collection includes art from six continents, spanning about 5,000 years.
Current Exhibitions
Dayanita Singh: Pothi Khana
Parallel Lines: New Textile Masterworks Inspired by Geometry
Jovan C. Speller: Nurturing, and Other Rituals of Protection
Past Exhibitions
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 is 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.
Egyptomania
She was wealthy, single, and always in the right place at the right time. But when Lily Place was in Egypt during the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, her art collecting suddenly put her at the epicenter of a curious and powerful trend that was about to shape world history one last time.
The Woman Who Knew Everything
Miriam McHugh Taney was a professional know-it-all, lecturing on everything from the Italian Renaissance to early American furniture—a rare authority for a woman in the 1930s. But the real purpose of her museum talks was far more interesting.