National Museum of Women in the Arts

National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), museum in Washington, D.C., dedicated to art made by women. Founded by collectors Wilhelmina Cole Holladay and Wallace F. Holladay, her husband, in 1981, it was the first museum of its kind in the world. By the 21st century the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) was housing a collection of about 6,000 works dating from the Renaissance to the present by female, transgender, and nonbinary artists.

History

There are two different stories regarding Wilhelmina Cole Holladay’s inspiration for the NMWA. The museum’s official version describes how Holladay, while traveling in Europe with her husband in the 1970s, became interested in the Flemish still-life painter Clara Peeters. She saw the artist’s work displayed in Vienna and Madrid, but, once she and her husband returned to the United States, she found neither examples of Peeters’s work in museums nor mention of the painter in art history texts. Moreover, Peeters was not the only woman artist the books failed to include. One text, H.W. Janson’s History of Art (1967), which was commonly used in survey art history courses at colleges, did not mention any women artists (until a third edition was published in 1987). As Holladay wrote in her memoir, this inequity inspired her to make women’s art her life’s work. The second version of the story, which is posited by former NMWA employees, describes how Holladay, deciding between buying two still lifes, found that the still life painted by a woman was one-quarter the price of the still life by a man, sparking Holladay’s realization that women’s art was substantially less expensive to collect than men’s.

As the Holladays grew their private collection of women’s art, which numbered about 500 works by the 1980s, Wilhelmina Cole Holladay began fundraising to open her own museum. She relied on her social connections to obtain donations, which included $1 million from her neighbor, the granddaughter of oil billionaire J. Paul Getty. The NMWA was incorporated in 1981 as a private, nonprofit museum. It operated out of the Holladays’ residence and offered docent-led tours of their collection. In 1983 the NMWA purchased a flatiron-shaped building on New York Avenue, in Washington, D.C., a couple of blocks from the White House. The building once housed the headquarters of a Masonic Temple, which, according to tradition, would not have allowed women inside. Holladay’s society status also helped grow the museum’s cultural capital: the fashion designers Diane von Furstenberg and Hubert de Givenchy were early supporters, the former acting as an adviser and the latter headlining a fundraising gala. At the museum’s 1987 building opening ceremony, Barbara Bush, then second lady of the United States, cut the ribbon.

The collection

The Holladays’ art collection formed the core of the NMWA’s holdings. Other works were donated or funded by Wilhelmina Cole Holladay’s vast network. Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky (1937) was gifted to the museum by playwright and politician Clare Boothe Luce, who purportedly convinced Kahlo not to destroy the painting after the artist learned of Trotsky’s assassination in 1940. Democratic lobbyist and art collector Tony Podesta has also donated some 500 works. Among the museum’s notable pieces are ones by Mary Cassatt, Ana Mendieta, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Amy Sherald, the latter of whom is best known for painting Michelle Obama’s portrait for the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Criticism

From the beginning of her endeavor, Holladay faced questions as to why women’s art was important enough for its own museum at all, and the NMWA found critics in both conservative and feminist groups. A common right-wing critique was that the NMWA made art unnecessarily political. Holladay, however, did not see her cause as at all political. Rather, she told The Washington Post the year the NMWA opened that she felt “an art museum should not be concerned with politics, abortion, or homosexuality.” Some feminists bemoaned this stance and feared that by isolating art by women, the museum would reinforce the idea that such work was unworthy of display in established institutions.

The NMWA after Holladay

Upon Holladay’s death in 2021 the NMWA received more than 60 additional works from her and her late husband’s collection. It was also left to grapple with how to proceed without its founder, who had for so long been inextricable from the museum itself. During Holladay’s tenure as chair of the board, she encouraged curators to keep overtly political themes out of exhibitions. In 2023 the museum released a statement expanding its mission to include all artists who may experience gender-based discrimination, including female, transgender, and nonbinary artists. That same year the NMWA reopened after a two-year, $67.5 million renovation. On that occasion The New York Times asked whether a museum dedicated to women was still relevant, considering that, by the 21st century, the work of women artists had become more visible in museum surveys and gallery shows. Susan Fisher Sterling, the director of the museum, responded, “People in the art world always think we’re achieving parity faster than we are.” She went on, “We’re not even close to there, if 89 percent of acquisitions are men’s work,” referring to a finding by ArtNet News journalists Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin in 2022 that only 11 percent of artworks acquired by U.S. museums between 2008 and 2020 were by female-identifying artists.