Miró and the United States @ Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona + The Phillips Collection, Washington DC - A Major Exhibition

Miró and the United States

Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

10 October 2025 – 22 February 2026

The Phillips Collection, Washington 

21 March – 5 July 2026

The Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, in collaboration with The Phillips Collection in Washington, presents a new and revealing exhibition entitled Miró and the United States, which highlights the intense, bidirectional and intergenerational relationship between Joan Miró and his contemporaries in North America. While it is well known that many North American artists were inspired by Miró, it is less well known that he was also inspired by North American art, particularly gestural, action and large format painting. This exchange and creative flow spanned continents and generations and is one of the central themes of the exhibition, which is part of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Fundació Joan Miró. Coming from a Spain devastated by the Franco dictatorship, the United States represented for Joan Miró not only art, but also a country of large open horizons, hope, democracy, future and endless possibilities.

Miró and the United States brings together an outstanding selection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, films and archival documents from American and European collections, as well as new studies by renowned specialists on Miró’s artistic evolution.

Miró and the United States is a unique exhibition because it offers a fresh look at Miró’s place in modern art, a reading that places the North American context at its heart. In other words, rather than focusing on the French context, which is essential for understanding his work from the 1920s and 1930s onwards, the show situates the United States as a pivotal territory in the evolution of Joan Miró’s artistic language, his international recognition and his connections with other artists. The United States enabled Joan Miró to undertake large-scale public projects – such as the sculpture Moon, Sun and One Star, made for Chicago – that would have been unfeasible in Spain at the time. The open and experimental environment of the United States helped Miró to consolidate his creative freedom and international recognition.

The exhibition therefore showcases key moments in Miró’s career in the USA: his two retrospectives in New York (in 1941 and 1959), his seven visits between 1947 and 1968, and also the pivotal role played by his dealer, Pierre Matisse, as well as the support of various American institutions and collectors.

The exhibition is a unique event as it displays 138 works from American and European collections as well as those from the Fundació Joan Miró’s own holdings, including both works by Joan Miró and approximately forty other artists. The selection is based on known connections and intergenerational relationships of admiration, including the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Helen Frankenthaler, Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, Alice Trumbull Mason, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, among many others. This artistic conversation demonstrates how Miró’s legacy continues to live on.

Based on years of research, the exhibition re-examines the established narratives about Miró’s position in the history of art through the selection of artists who feature in it. The different sections of Miró and the United States explore this relationship between Joan Miró and forty-nine contemporary artists from different generations. The exhibition also includes many artists who, despite not being originally from the country, moved or went there temporarily to develop part of their artistic careers. Driven by immigration, exile, the search for opportunities or cultural exchange, these creators played a decisive role in shaping the diverse and international North American art scene.

Although it has become commonplace, the fact that the centre of the art world shifted from Paris to New York is historically grounded. The global upheaval of the Second World War led to many European artists and intellectuals being exiled to the United States, fostering the emergence of North American Abstract Expressionism. This geopolitical and cultural shift was examined in a pioneering manner by Serge Guilbaut in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1985), in which he argues how New York appropriated the symbolic leadership of modern art.

Joan Miró witnessed and participated in the shift of artistic capital from Paris to New York in the period immediately following the turbulent years of the Second World War. This geopolitical and cultural reconfiguration, which may have once seemed distant, now resonates with an urgency and topicality that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. One of the major attractions of Miró and the United States is the curatorial proposal, which brings together works and artists that reveal connections between Miró and the North American art scene that have never been seen before. The exhibition also offers the public an exceptional opportunity to view works that have never previously been exhibited in Spain, including Lee Krasner’s The Seasons, which is on loan from the Whitney Museum for the first time.

Another exhibition highlight is the presence of Miró's Mural Painting, 20 March 1961 (1961), a monumental work that was exhibited several times in the 1960s: in 1961 at the Galerie Maeght in Paris and the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, and in 1964 in London and Zurich as part of the Miró retrospective organised by Roland Penrose. Since then, once Josep Lluís Sert had donated the mural to the Harvard Art Museums, this is the first time they have authorised its loan for an exhibition in Europe, a fact that makes its presence in the Miró and the United States exhibition a truly exceptional event.

Moreover, in an unprecedented move, the first two works that Joan Miró exhibited in the United States are reunited for the first time: Le Renversement (1924) and Painting (1926), which were originally presented at the Brooklyn Museum.

As part of Miró and the United States, the Fundació Joan Miró is presenting 22 pochoirs on paper of Constellations, dated 1959. Like the original Constellations of 1940-1941, they were conceived by Joan Miró so that they could be viewed from both sides. While these pieces have been previously exhibited in other settings, this is the first time they have been displayed according to this original, double-sided design, exactly as the artist had intended. This unprecedented curatorial commitment recovers his original vision, offering the public a fresh look at the formal freedom and experimental spirit that define his work.

Alongside important works admired by Joan Miró, such as Jackson Pollock's Number 14, are more surprising dialogues, such as that with Janet Sobel, whose Illusion of Solidity (1945) shows her to be the precursor of the dripping technique One of the exhibition’s crowning works is Lee Krasner’s The Seasons, a piece of imposing dimensions and sublime visual and emotional impact that is travelling to Spain for the first time. The exhibition also sheds light on female artists who had to use male pseudonyms to gain recognition, such as Henrietta Myers (Peter Miller) and Corinne Michelle West (Michael West).

The Miró and the United States exhibition arrives at a particularly opportune moment, filling a clear need in Miró’s artistic story. It transports us to another time and place – full of light, curiosity and risk – when art was a bold commitment to a better future. Amidst a 20th century marked by repression and instability, contact with the United States represented a source of creative energy and openness for Joan Miró, a democratic and dynamic horizon full of artistic opportunities. Miró actively engaged in dialogue with the North American artistic community, which became a place of inspiration and transformation. This fruitful exchange not only renewed his career, but also reinforced his ability to connect with a world in motion, full of contrasts and possibilities. The exhibition therefore invites us to look back and move forward with hope, to continue taking risks and to believe in the power of art as a tool for change and expanding horizons.

Miró and the United States

© Courtesy Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Miró and the United States, available in Catalan, Spanish and English. It includes texts by renowned Miró curators and specialists: Dawn Ades, Beatriz Cordero Martín, Marko Daniel, Matthew Gale, Patricia Juncosa, Robert Lubar Messeri, Teresa Montaner, Dolors Rodríguez Roig, Élisa Sclaunick, Elsa Smithgall and Anne Umland.

The Miró and the United States exhibition, co-organised with The Phillips Collection in Washington, will also be on show there from 21 March to 5 July 2026.

Curatorship: Marko Daniel, Matthew Gale and Dolors Rodríguez Roig from the Fundació Joan Miró, in collaboration with Elsa Smithgall from The Phillips Collection

FUNDACIO JOAN MIRO, BARCELONA

www.fmirobcn.org

Nick Cave: Mammoth @ Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC - The museum’s largest-ever commission by a single artist

Nick Cave: Mammoth

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

February 13, 2026 - Jananuary 3, 2027

Nick Cave, Artist in his studio

Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery 

Photograph by James Prinz

The Smithsonian American Art Museum will debut “Nick Cave: Mammoth,” a monumental new body of work by internationally acclaimed artist NICK CAVE. Commissioned by the museum, “Mammoth” marks Cave’s first solo exhibition in Washington, D.C. and represents the museum’s largest-ever commission by a single artist.  

“Mammoth” is Cave’s most personal project to date. Drawing on his childhood in Chariton County, Missouri—where his grandparents farmed and where the quilts, tools and clothing they made were a part of everyday life—Nick Cave roots this installation in family history, landscapes and craft traditions. He transforms these sources into a world animated by memory and the transformative possibilities of the imagination. Combining sculpture, video and found objects, the exhibition reflects on the artist’s own creative impulse and invites audiences to consider their relationship to the natural world and the everyday objects and histories that shape our lives.  

“‘Nick Cave: Mammoth’ builds on the museum’s commitment to present artists whose work speaks to the American experience and fosters connection,” said Jane Carpenter-Rock, acting Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “It is an honor to support a new body of work by one of today’s leading artists, the museum’s most significant commission to date by a single artist and to present it in dialogue with the sweep of American art across our galleries.”

“‘Mammoth’ is a conversation across time, a meditation on how and why we make, and how we live with what we inherit,” said Sarah Newman. “Nick Cave gathers fragments of daily life—toys, tools, keepsakes, even the remains of ancient creatures—and transforms them into a shared space of memory and imagination. His work is a powerful reminder that objects are often more than things; they carry our histories, our knowledge, and the stories that carry us forward.”

Nick Cave remakes a suite of galleries on the museum’s third floor into a series of immersive environments. Against a 60-by-20-foot hand-beaded tapestry laid over a landscape of Chariton County, Missouri, towering lifeguard chairs rise—some crowned with massive skeletal mammoth heads, others draped in hides. In the center of the space, a glowing, 700-square-foot light table holds thousands of found objects—from vintage tools, juggling balls and pie plates to his grandmother’s thimble collection—arranged like paleontological specimens. Some remain recognizable; others have been transformed into masks, creatures and contraptions that feel alive with spirit and intention.

The mammoths come alive in “Roam,” a video projected across four walls of an adjoining gallery that follows the massive creatures as they wander through present-day Chicago. In another space, Cave presents bronze sculptures from his “Amalgams” series, which fuse casts from his own body with natural forms such as flowers, birds and trees. These works, surrounded by metal tole flowers and antique cast-iron doorstops—including those from his grandparents’ home—evoke both loss and renewal, the solace of nature and the imprint of inheritance.

The installation will be activated by a site-specific performance.

Artist Nick Cave

Nick Cave (born 1959, Fulton, Missouri; lives and works in Chicago) is an artist and educator working between the visual and performing arts through a wide range of mediums including sculpture, installation, video, sound and performance. His work builds upon generations of Black artists and artisans, from quilters such as his own grandmothers to the assemblers of yard art in the American South, who imbued cast-off materials with new meaning. Nick Cave has harnessed this transformative impulse throughout his work—most famously in his series of “Soundsuits,” part sculpture and part garment, which conceal their wearers’ identities at the same time as they metamorphose into others.  

Nick Cave earned a bachelor’s degree in fine art at Kansas City Art Institute, a master’s degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and is currently director of the graduate program in fashion at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is in many museum collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Arkansas). In 2022, he completed a multi-part commission from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City for a glass mosaic and video work “Each One, Every One, Equal All” that is on view in the Times Sq-42 St Station. Other recent projects and exhibitions include the major retrospective “Nick Cave: Forothermore” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2022); “The Let Go” at Park Avenue Armory (2018); and “Nick Cave: Until” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2016).  

Publication: A richly illustrated catalog, published in association with D. Giles Limited, will accompany the exhibition. The book offers an intimate look into Cave’s creative process, featuring found and personal objects that inspired him, annotated with his own handwritten notes and drawings. The publication includes essays by Newman, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw and Cherise Smith, and a major new poem by J Drew Lanham.

“Nick Cave: Mammoth” is organized by Sarah Newman, the James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art, with support from Anne Hyland, curatorial associate.

SAAM - SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM 

8th and G Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20004

americanart.si.edu

Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work @ Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington + Other Venues

Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington 

October 24, 2025 - July 12, 2026

Grandma Moses 

We Are Resting, 1951 

Oil on high-density fiberboard 

Smithsonian American Art Museum, 

Gift of the Kallir Family, in Memory of Hildegard Bachert, 2019.55, 

© Grandma Moses Properties Co., NY

"Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work" repositions Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses (1860–1961) as a multidimensional force in American art, whose beloved painted recollections of rural life earned her a distinctive place in the cultural imagination of the postwar era. Drawing its name from Moses’ reflection on her own life as a “good day’s work,” the exhibition reveals how Moses’ art fused creativity, labor and memories from a century-long life. 

“Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work” is anchored by artworks from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection, including many of Moses’ most celebrated paintings. The 88 works in the exhibition are drawn from the museum’s holdings and loans from private collections and public museums and institutions. This selection of objects, primarily created between the late 1930s and the artist’s death in 1961, are woven into a narrative that explores lesser-known aspects of Moses’ life, including the years she spent living, working and raising her family in post-Reconstruction Virginia. Later sections of the exhibition probe Moses’ artistic evolution as the labor of artmaking displaced the hours once dedicated to family and farming, and her personal transformation from farmwife to famous artist in Cold War America. Photographs, ephemeral objects and Moses’ own words—drawn largely from her autobiography—illuminate artworks that were deeply connected to the artist’s life.

The exhibition is organized by Leslie Umberger, senior curator of folk and self-taught art, and Randall Griffey, head curator, with support from curatorial assistant Maria R. Eipert. The exhibition will travel following its premiere in Washington, D.C.

“Grandma Moses was instrumental in bringing self-taught art to the forefront of American consciousness,” said Jane Carpenter-Rock, Acting Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “As one of the first major museums to champion and collect works in this tradition, our museum is honored to shed new light on Grandma Moses’ practice and engage new generations by becoming a major resource for studying her art and legacy.”

“Moses was many things to many people: she was an ambassador for democratic American values, a folk hero and pop-culture celebrity, a comforting grandmotherly figure representing a bygone age, an inspiring elder reinventing herself in retirement and an untrained artist presenting what was then considered ‘modern primitivism’ as a surprisingly successful alternative to abstract art,” Leslie Umberger said. “‘A Good Day’s Work’ reconciles these disparate truths while centering on Moses’ art and the life that inspired it—one shaped by ingenuity, labor, a doggedly positive outlook and a distilled understanding of a life well lived.” 

In a lifetime that spanned the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, the artist experienced seismic historical shifts, including the post-Reconstruction and civil rights eras and two world wars. She began painting in earnest in her late 70s and was 80 when gallerist Otto Kallir introduced her to the American public with her first solo exhibition. In her artworks, Moses melded direct observation of nature and life as she saw it, resulting in idiosyncratic, yet engaging, stories of America. “Grandma Moses” as the press would indelibly dub her, quickly became a media sensation, achieving a controversial celebrity status that surpassed the female artists of her day and remains compelling today.

Through a series of gifts and pledges of 15 important paintings from Kallir’s family, along with gifts from several additional donors and select museum purchases, the museum is establishing a destination-collection of 33 works by Moses, balanced across styles, dates, themes and historical moments. A major asset within the museum’s internationally recognized collection of work by folk and self-taught artists, the Moses collection will comprise significant works, from her earliest extant painting, “Untitled (Fireboard)” (1918), to iconic pieces including “Bringing in the Maple Sugar” (1939), “Black Horses” (1942) and “Out for Christmas Trees” (1946), to her last completed painting, “The Rainbow” (1961), all of which are represented in the exhibition. Also on view will be the first painting donated to the museum by the Kallir family in 2016, “Grandma Moses Goes to the Big City” (1946), a rare work in which Moses includes herself in the depicted narrative. The museum will be a premier Moses repository for scholars and the public.

Artist Grandma Moses

Anna Mary Robertson Moses was born in Greenwich, New York, in 1860 and raised on a farm. From early in her life, she worked as a hired girl, helping neighbors and relatives with cleaning, cooking and sewing. As a child, her father had encouraged her to draw on old newsprint, and she used berry and grape juices to color her images.  

Robertson married at 27 and moved, with her new husband, Thomas Salmon Moses, to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. There, over the course of the next 18 years, the couple raised five children and worked as dairy farmers, shaping a highly successful butter-making business. Moses did not start painting until she was in her late 70s, after her children had moved on and her husband had died, looking for something, as she put it, with which “to keep busy and out of mischief.” She made paintings that merged fact with fiction and personal with national history, drawing on her own memories as well as family and local lore. She began her foray into the limelight by presenting her pictures at country fairs, alongside her prize-winning fruit preserves.  

In 1938, a collector saw her paintings in the window of a local pharmacy and bought them all. Two years later, Kallir—an art dealer and recent immigrant who had fled the Nazi regime in his native Austria—gave Moses her first solo exhibition. In the aftermath of World War II, Moses was seen as a global ambassador for democratic American values, and her unpretentious sensibilities and the scenes of family life and holidays enchanted a populace weary from conflict and rapid change. Following a press event and presentation of her paintings at Gimbels department store, the media dubbed her “Grandma Moses.” Gradually, ‘Grandma Moses’ became a household name. In 1947, Hallmark licensed the rights to reproduce her paintings on greeting cards. Reproductions on drapery fabric, china and other consumer goods followed, along with magazine features, television and radio interviews and an Academy Award-nominated documentary. Moses died at 101 in 1961, after painting more than 1,500 images.  

Publication: A richly illustrated catalog, published in association with Princeton University Press, will accompany the exhibition. It is co-edited by Umberger and Griffey, with a foreword by Carpenter-Rock and contributions by Erika Doss, Eleanor Jones Harvey, Stacy C. Hollander, Jane Kallir and Katherine Jentleson. The book will be available for purchase ($60) in the museum’s store and online.

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

8th and G Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20004

americanart.si.edu

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen @ Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC - A Landmark Exhibition

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Through January 3, 2027 

Portrait of Adam Pendleton

© Adam Pendleton. Photo: Matthew Septimus 

Adam Pendleton 

WE ARE NOT (Composition), 2024 

Silkscreen ink and black gesso on canvas 

19 x 15 in. (43.3 x 38.1 cm) 

© Adam Pendleton. Photo: Andy Romer

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presents “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen,” a landmark exhibition by Adam Pendleton. The artist presents new and recent paintings as well as a single-channel video work. Pendleton’s first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, highlights his unique contributions to contemporary American painting while making use of the architecture of the Museum and the history of the National Mall.

“Introducing Adam Pendleton’s recent work in our 50th year is intentional,” said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. “His exhibition reflects the Hirshhorn’s mission as a 21st-century art museum that amplifies the voices of artists responding to history and place in real time. ‘Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen’ invites our almost one million annual visitors to think about the complexities of abstraction within the American experience, and its potential to forge associations among our shared past, present and future.”

“I am delighted to exhibit my work on the occasion of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary,” said Adam Pendleton. “It presents a meaningful opportunity to engage, in subtle and poetic ways, with the Museum’s architecture, position on the National Mall and legacy of showing significant abstract and conceptual work.”

Adam Pendleton is known for his visually distinct and conceptually rigorous paintings that he begins on paper with drips, splatters, sprays, geometric shapes, words and phrases, and inky fragments reminiscent of broken letters. These visual experiments are at times carefully controlled and at others freely improvised. He photographs these initial compositions and then layers them using a screen-printing process, purposefully blurring the distinctions between the act of painting, the act of drawing and the act of photography.

“Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” features Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada,” “Days,” “WE ARE NOT,” and new “Composition” and “Movement” paintings. An encounter with any of these works, typically composed of two colors on black-gessoed grounds, brings forth the immediacy of gestural abstraction, the considered execution of minimal and conceptual art, and the playfulness of concrete poetry. “Painting is as much an act of performance as it is an act of translation and transformation,” the artist has stated.

The artist also debuts “Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?),” a new video work that is projected floor to ceiling. The work makes use of still and moving images of Resurrection City, the multiday encampment erected on the National Mall in the spring and summer of 1968, which is considered to be the culmination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. Strobing in and out of darkness, the documentary material is interspersed with found footage and punctuated by flashes of geometric forms, dissolving the boundaries between abstraction and representation. The film’s score, by multi-instrumentalist composer Hahn Rowe, integrates a reading by the late poet and cultural critic Amiri Baraka with an orchestration of brass, woodwinds and drums.

In its totality, “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” offers a powerful counterpoint to the Museum’s collection surveys that are concurrently presented in adjacent galleries. The exhibition is organized by Evelyn C. Hankins, the Hirshhorn’s head curator, with support from former curatorial assistant Alice Phan. “It is an honor to invite Adam Pendleton to respond to the Hirshhorn’s singular architecture and location,” said Hankins. “‘Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen’ speaks to the vision of our anniversary—a period of simultaneous reflection and forward thinking, a space in which Pendleton has been operating for almost two decades.”

“Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with scholarly essays, Studio Hirshhorn and Hirshhorn Eye videos, and free public programs.

Artist Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is a central figure among a cross-generational group of painters redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His work has been shown at major museums around the world. Recent solo and group exhibitions include “Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White, and Light,” at mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria (2023–2024); “Adam Pendleton: To Divide By,” at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2023–2024); “Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); “Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together,” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada (2022); and “Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021–2022).

Pendleton’s work is part of numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; and Tate London.

HIRSHHORN MUSEUM

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Independence Ave SW and 7th St SW, Washington, DC 20560

hirshhorn.si.edu

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC

April 4, 2025 - January 3, 2027

State Fairs: Growing American Craft @ Renwick Gallery of the SAAM, Washington

State Fairs: Growing American Craft

Renwick Gallery of the SAAM, Washington

August 22, 2025 - September 7, 2026

Liz Schreiber

State Fairs: Growing American Craft, 2024-2025

Various seeds and flower petals 

Courtesy of Liz Schreiber

State fairs have sparked the American imagination with their celebrations of agricultural bounty, mechanical innovations and skilled handcrafts since the first fair was held in 1841 in upstate New York. Craft has always been an essential element of state fairs and Native American tribal fairs, expressing the creative and practical values of handmade goods in American society. State fairs enable artists to display and sell their work and help sustain unique regional and cultural traditions.  

State Fairs: Growing American Craft will occupy both floors of the Renwick Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s branch location for contemporary craft. It is the first exhibition dedicated to artists’ contributions to the great U.S. tradition of state fairs. With more than 240 artworks on view, dating from the mid-19th century to the present, this exhibition registers the many ways the craft of state fairs has enriched the lives of artists and deepened the understanding of American art.

The exhibition is the culmination of five years of on-the-ground research involving visits to 15 state fairs across the U.S.; collaborative projects with artists in Kentucky, New Jersey, Alaska, West Virginia and Utah; and research in several state historical societies, history museums and archives. Artists and 4-H clubs from 43 states and tribal nations are represented, with all 50 states represented in a photo gallery.  

“‘State Fairs’ showcases what the team at SAAM’s Renwick Gallery does best—it is the latest in a series of exhibitions that reassess and uplift craft’s relevance to our everyday lives and American culture,” said Jane Carpenter-Rock, Acting Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “To spotlight these extraordinary and often under-sung artists is an unparalleled opportunity for audiences to deepen and expand perceptions of craft in the United States.”

Visitors will enjoy show-stopping spectacles like the iconic size 96 boots of Big Tex (a 55-foot statue known as the world’s tallest cowboy) from the State Fair of Texas, a life-size butter cow created on-site by the Iowa State Fair’s official butter sculptor Sarah Pratt and a display featuring a pyramid of 700 glass jars of preserved fruits and vegetables by canning superstar Rod Zeitler. Additional highlights include sculptor Robert Arneson’s break from functional ceramics during a pottery demonstration at the 1961 California State Fair, Lillian Colton’s groundbreaking crop-art portrait of Richard Nixon, regalia from pageants hosted by Indigenous fairs, benches commissioned from craft students at Kentucky’s Berea College, a 1965 butter-carton dress created by the Minnesota State Fair’s Princess Kay of the Milky Way (the goodwill ambassador for Minnesota’s dairy farmers) and much more.

To complement the exhibition, the museum debuts a new site-specific installation by artist Justin Favela in the Renwick Gallery’s Rubenstein Grand Salon.

“The first state fair I attended as a child was the Minnesota State Fair, which we called the Great Minnesota Get-Together,” said Mary Savig, the Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft. “While organizing this exhibition over the past several years, I experienced firsthand the collective spirit of artists getting together at state fairs across the country, sharing their talents and memories with fellow fairgoers. ‘State Fairs: Growing American Craft’ provides a long-overdue spotlight on these exceptional artists. When looking at our history from the perspective of the fairgrounds, a richer picture of American art emerges.”

Each gallery in the exhibition considers personal stories of craft found in different areas of the fairgrounds, from the art exhibits and heritage villages to the parades, dairy barns and rodeos. Ribbon-winning artworks and engaging craft demonstrations illuminate the lives of the artists—their families, memories, honors and struggles. It offers a perspective on the social power of fairgrounds across the United States and dispels stereotypes about rural communities. Many of the artworks on view directly connect the artists’ personal experiences with the experience of the fair. The exhibition also calls attention to people and communities whose experiences with fairs are entangled with histories of exclusion and displacement.  

The works in “State Fairs” are drawn from the museum’s holdings and loans from various artists and fairs, private and family collections and public museums and institutions.

“State Fairs: Growing American Craft” is organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 

RENWICK GALLERY

Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20006

americanart.si.edu

Mary Savig: Curator-in-Charge for the Renwick Gallery of the SAAM, Washington DC

Mary Savig

Curator-in-Charge for the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Mary Savig

Photo by Libby Weiler 

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has appointed Mary Savig the Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator-in-Charge for the Renwick Gallery, home to the museum’s craft and decorative art program since 1972. Mary Savig, who has served as acting curator-in-charge since January 2024, joined the museum staff in 2020 as the Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft. During her tenure, Savig has continued to guide the direction of the Renwick Gallery’s curatorial program with a roster of acclaimed exhibitions that have contributed new scholarship to the field. As curator-in-charge, Mary Savig will oversee staff, acquire artworks for the museum’s permanent collection and present exhibitions and collection displays that advance appreciation for craft and maker culture at the Renwick Gallery. Savig’s appointment is effective immediately. 

“After a national search, I am delighted to welcome Mary Savig to this role,” said Jane Carpenter-Rock, acting Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “Her distinctive vision for the state of craft in the United States and dedication to championing its importance within American culture opens up new possibilities for SAAM’s contemporary craft program.” 

Mary Savig is the lead curator for “State Fairs: Growing American Craft,” opening August 22, the first exhibition dedicated to artists’ contributions to the great U.S. tradition of state fairs. Other recent exhibitions that reassess and uplift craft’s relevance to American culture include “We Gather at the Edge: Contemporary Quilts by Black Women Artists” (2025), “Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women” (2024) and “This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World” (2022). 

Previously, Mary Savig was curator of manuscripts from 2013 to 2020 at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, where she pursued collections documenting the history of American studio craft and conducted oral-history interviews with Beth Lipman, Preston Singletary and James Tanner. 

Mary Savig earned a master’s degree from The George Washington University and a doctorate in American studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her dissertation was titled “Stitches as Seeds: Crafting New Natures.” Savig’s research interests include American studio craft, contemporary craft, American art and material culture. 

RENVICK GALLERY

Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20006

americanart.si.edu

Shahzia Sikander: The Last Post @ SAAM - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Shahzia Sikander: The Last Post

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington

July 3, 2025 – July 12, 2026

Shahzia Sikander 

The Last Post, 2010

Single-channel HD digital animation, color,

5.1 surround sound; 10:00 minutes 

Music: Du Yun 

Smithsonian American Art Museum, 

Museum purchase through the 

Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment,

 in partnership with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, 2025.11

© 2025, Shahzia Sikander. 

Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles

Shahzia Sikander’s iconoclastic multimedia explorations encompass drawing and painting, mosaics, sculpture and video. She initially trained in an illustration tradition—classical Indo-Persian miniature painting—that was bounded by frames, borders and precise architecture. From this, she developed her unique, disruptive style.  

Through precisely inked and animated scenes, Sikander’s video animation “The Last Post” (2010) critically considers the legacy of British colonialism in Asia, using her signature approach of infusing Indo-Persian manuscript compositions with a contemporary perspective. “The Last Post” centers a European gentleman in a red waistcoat, a symbol of British imperial power, based on miniature paintings from the late 18th century depicting British East India Company officials. Indian court architecture, Chinese cut-paper silhouettes and a watercolor map of South Asia all dissolve and reconfigure around him as electronic beats by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun explode on the soundtrack.  

“The Last Post” was acquired in 2025 by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The work is presented in a dedicated gallery for immersive media art installations that opened in 2023 on the museum’s third floor. The 10-minute film runs continuously and can be entered at any time. The presentation is organized by Saisha Grayson, curator of time-based media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

SAAM - Smithsonian American Art Museum

8th and G Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20004

americanart.si.edu

William Gropper: Artist of the People @ The Phillips Collection, Washington DC

William Gropper: Artist of the People 

The Phillips Collection, Washington

October 17, 2024 - January 5, 2025

WILLIAM GROPPER

Self-portrait, 1965

Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in.

Collection of Craig Gropper, 

Courtesy ACA Gallery, NY

WILLIAM GROPPER

Eternal Senator, 1935

Oil on canvas, 72 x 42 1/8 in.

Collection of Harvey Ross

WILLIAM GROPPER

Construction of the Dam, 1938

Oil on canvas, 27 1/4 x 87 1/4 in.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, 

Transfer from the U.S. Department of the Interior,

National Park Service

WILLIAM GROPPER

“Our present foes are domestic foes, not foreign foes.”, 1942

Ink, crayon, and opaque white paint on paper

15 3/8 x 11 1/4 in.

The Phillips Collection

Gift of Harvey Ross in honor of Elsa Smithgall’s

professionalism and dedicated service to 

The Phillips Collection, 2023

Published in The Illustrious Dunderheads, 1942

WILLIAM GROPPER

Congressional Declaration, 1947

Ink, crayon, and opaque white paint on paper

19 5/8 x 15 5/8 in.

Collection of Harvey and Harvey-Ann Ross

Published in New Masses, July 8, 1947

The Phillips Collection presents William Gropper: Artist of the People, the first exhibition in Washington, DC, dedicated to political cartoonist, painter, and printmaker WILLIAM GROPPER (b. 1897, New York, NY; d. 1977, Manhasset, NY). Featuring more than 40 paintings, cartoons, and caricatures this focused exhibition reveals William Gropper’s biting commentary on human rights, class, labor, freedom, democracy, and the hypocrisy of the American dream. The exhibition spans the artist’s most prolific years and reconstructs his political critiques and commitment to social justice for a contemporary audience. 

The son of impoverished immigrants from Romania and Ukraine, William Gropper grew up poor on the Lower East Side. Witnessing the daily injustices face by the working class during his formative years instilled in him a sympathy for marginalized communities, which greatly influenced his direction as an artist. Gropper contributed thousands of incisive illustrations to Vanity Fair and the New York Tribune, as well as more radical papers like the New Masses, Rebel Worker, and Morning Freiheit. Hailed as the Honoré Daumier of his time due to his sharp criticism of politicians and the government, William Gropper developed a powerful artistic language to catalyze social change.

“Gropper was an artist of, by, and for the people, who fervently believed in the power of art to bring people together and effect change,” says Vradenburg Director & CEO Jonathan P. Binstock. “Over half a century since their creation, Gropper’s work exposes universal human concerns, including the fragility of our democracy, which continue to persist. As an artist who has long been overlooked in the history of 20th-century American art, we are excited to share his work with our guests and spark conversations about its relevance to our contemporary world.”

This presentation of Gropper’s satires and commentary featured examples produced during a fertile period in the artist’s career, between the 1930s and 1950s. During the Great Depression, Gropper, like many of his fellow social realist artists and mentors like Robert Henri and George Bellows, celebrated the importance and inherent dignity of the worker in his art. As a labor activist, Gropper championed unions and defended government programs like the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which provided government jobs for millions of the unemployed and commissioned public artworks by artists who have come to define the American modernist canon including Stuart Davis, Dorothea Lange, Jacob Lawrence, and Jackson Pollock. 

“Gropper was a fierce, lifelong social justice advocate who used art to advocate for a better world. He believed strongly that artists be given a ‘free hand’ to reveal hard truths,” says Phillips Chief Curator and exhibition curator Elsa Smithgall. “In addition to his scathing social and political commentary, Gropper also turned to folk heroes and popular imagery from American contemporary discourse to portray optimistic scenes of his vision for an egalitarian society.” 

William Gropper’s socially conscious work went beyond support for the worker to the condemnation of racism, fascism, antisemitism, and governmental corruption. In 1936, while on assignment for Vanity Fair, Gropper wielded his brush to document proceedings of the US Senate, where he observed firsthand the shortcomings of democracy as a political system. During World War II, William Gropper supported the war effort, creating war bond posters and cartoons condemning domestic and foreign fascists. He produced thousands of cartoons and received numerous commissions for murals throughout the country, including Construction of a Dam in the Department of the Interior building in DC.

In the 1950s, William Gropper found himself in the crosshairs of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “Red Scare,” becoming the first of only two artists to be blacklisted, with his works banned from State Department traveling shows and many museums and galleries. The results were immediate and devastating, yet this did not diminish his belief in democracy and freedom of expression, nor his critical eye and artistic vigor. Following these dramatic events, William Gropper produced his famed 50-print set titled The Capriccios after Spanish artist Francisco de Goya’s series of the same name, drawing a provocative parallel between the Spanish Inquisition and McCarthyism. He channeled this dark chapter of paranoia and political scapegoating into his art and regained popular reception in the final decades of his life. He continued to produce works that speak to themes of war, prejudice, greed, and exploitation into his late seventies. By the year of his death, he had shown at most major museums across the US.

William Gropper: Artist of the People is the first exhibition presented by The Phillips Collection dedicated to the artist. In addition to works on loan, the exhibition features a selection of William Gropper’s paintings, prints, and drawings from the collection of Harvey and Harvey-Ann Ross, many of which recently entered the museum’s permanent collection and will be exhibited for the first time. 

WILLIAM GROPPER: ARTIST OF THE PEOPLE

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

Edited by Elsa Smithgall, Chief Curator, The Phillips Collection

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated scholarly catalogue published by The Phillips Collection. It includes a foreword by Jonathan P. Binstock, Vradenburg Director & CEO of The Phillips Collection, essays by noted scholars Norman Kleeblatt, independent curator and critic, Allan Lichtman, Distinguished Professor of History, American University, and Lauren Strauss, Senior Professorial Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Jewish Studies, American University, a conversation between Harvey Ross and the exhibition’s curator Phillips Chief Curator Elsa Smithgall, and a translated excerpt of Gropper’s writings that appeared in the Yiddish publication Freiheit. The publication is available at the Museum Shop or online on the shop of The Phillips Collection's website.

THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION, WASHINGTON, DC

1600 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC 20009

phillipscollection.org

The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture @ SAAM - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

The Shape of Power

Stories of Race and American Sculpture

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

November 8, 2024 - September 14, 2025

ROBERTO LUGO

DNA Study Revisited, 2022

Urethane resin life cast, foam, wire, and acrylic paint 

Smithsonian American Art Museum, 

Museum purchase through the Catherine Walden Myer Fund, 2024.19

Photo courtesy the Smithsonian American Art Museum 

“The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum examines for the first time the role of sculpture in understanding and constructing the concept of race in the United States over nearly three centuries. Featuring 70 artists whose work crosses time, scale and media, the exhibition brings together American sculpture in its many forms to explore the ways in which it has shaped and reflected attitudes and understandings about race, and has served as an expression of resistance, liberation and a vital means for reclaiming identity. The exhibition includes 82 sculptures created between 1792 and 2023 ranging in size from palm-sized coins to monumental statues created from diverse media such as bronze, marble, shoes, paper and hair. The Smithsonian American Art Museum is the sole venue for this groundbreaking exhibition.

Judith Baca, Rina Banerjee, Ed Bereal, Huma Bhabha, Sanford Biggers, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sonya Clark, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Nicholas Galanin, Raven Halfmoon, Luis Jiménez, Simone Leigh, Yolanda López, Roberto Lugo, Pepón Osorio, Betye Saar, Alison Saar and Nari Ward, among other contemporary artists, have work displayed alongside works by artists who were active in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including Daniel Chester French, Sargent Johnson, Edmonia Lewis, Isamu Noguchi, Hiram Powers, Frederic Remington and Augusta Savage.

“As stewards of the largest collection of American sculpture in the world, SAAM has a vital responsibility to foster conversations about the role sculpture has played in shaping our ideas of race in the United States, from its historical roots to contemporary perspectives by leading artists of the times in which these works were created,” said Jane Carpenter-Rock, acting director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “The presentation of the artworks in ‘The Shape of Power’ exhibition are an invitation to think deeply and openly to engage with ideas that are crucial to our understanding of the past and our present.”

“American sculpture remains an understudied area of art history with the last major publication to survey the medium’s development in the United States dating back more than 50 years ago,” said Karen Lemmey, the Lucy S. Rhame Curator of Sculpture at the museum. “‘The Shape of Power’ and its accompanying publication offers new scholarship that provides a fuller picture of American art history and a more nuanced understanding of our nation’s past and present.”  

The exhibition is organized to allow for juxtapositions of historical and contemporary works that invite dialogue and reflection on notions of power and identity. This includes works ranging from Edmonia Lewis’ “Hagar in the Wilderness” (1875) that depicts the biblical story of an enslaved woman, to Roberto Lugo’s life-size self-portrait “DNA Study Revisited” (2022) painted head to toe in patterns representative of his ancestors and proportional to the percentage in his family’s heritage. Taken together, the works on view express the special capacity of sculpture to give palpable physical form to how concepts of race have been reflected, defined and redefined in the United States.  

“The Shape of Power” draws extensively on works from the museum’s collection, which is the largest collection of American sculpture in the world. The exhibition includes key loans from private and public collections, including the American Numismatic Society; Chrysler Museum of Art; El Museo del Barrio; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.  

Planning the exhibition included an unprecedented collaborative effort that engaged a range of scholarly and community partners who provided insights that helped guide the themes and interpretive elements. The curatorial team engaged with colleagues at museums across the Smithsonian Institution to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the exhibition’s theme, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, National Museum of Natural History and National Museum of the American Indian; the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience; students and faculty at Howard University and members of George Mason University’s student organization the Native American and Indigenous Alliance; as well as nearly all 39 living artists participating in the show. Members of the exhibition’s advisory council, composed of interdisciplinary scholars who teach in different regions across the country, contributed to the catalog. A free exhibition audio guide features the voices of artists, university students and curators.

The exhibition extends beyond the traditional suite of galleries to include monumental sculptures on long-term view at the museum, including the recently unveiled installation “Bridge” (2013–2014) by Los Angeles-based artist Glenn Kaino, which pays tribute to Olympian Tommie Smith’s historic gesture at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games; and Luis Jiménez’s work installed outside the museum entrance, “Vaquero” (modeled 1980, cast 1990), which translates to cowboy in Spanish and emphasizes the Spanish and Mexican roots of this classic American icon. A printed gallery guide is available to orient visitors to these spaces.

The exhibition is organized by Karen Lemmey; Tobias Wofford, associate professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University; and Grace Yasumura, assistant curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The Shape of Power

Stories of Race and American Sculpture

Exhibition Catalog

Smithsonian American Art Museum 

in association with Princeton University Press

292 pages -  ISBN 9780691261492

Publication: The exhibition catalog is co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Princeton University Press. It is written by Lemmey, Wofford and Yasumura with contributions by Renée Ater, Jacqueline Francis, Elizabeth Hutchinson, Tess Korobkin, Jami Powell, James Smalls and Claudia E. Zapata. The book is available for purchase ($65) in the museum’s store and online.

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

8th and G Streets, NW, Washington, DC 2000

americanart.si.edu

The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy @ National Gallery of Art, Washington

The Anxious Eye: 

German Expressionism and Its Legacy

National Gallery of Art, Washington

February 11 - May 27, 2024

Max Pechstein

Nude, 1909

Watercolor on brown paper

overall: 33.8 x 43.9 cm (13 5/16 x 17 5/16 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection

Otto Mueller

Two Bathers, c. 1920

Color crayons and watercolor

overall: 68.7 x 52.8 cm (27 1/16 x 20 13/16 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection

Lovis Corinth

The Fall of Man (Der südenfall), 1919

Color woodcut monotype

sheet: 30.5 x 23.5 cm (12 x 9 1/4 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund

Conrad Felixmüller

Couple in the Woods (Menschen Im Wald), 1918

Color woodcut on wove paper

block: 25.1 x 30.2 cm (9 7/8 x 11 7/8 in.)

sheet: 35.2 x 42.4 cm (13 7/8 x 16 11/16 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Ruth Cole Kainen

Max Beckmann

Group Portrait, Eden Bar (Gruppenbildnis Edenbar), 1923

Woodcut on heavy Japan paper

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection

Through their bold distortions, angular, simplified forms, and use of non-naturalistic colors, the German expressionists sought to convey complex emotional and psychological responses to their changing world during the social, cultural, and political upheavals of the early 20th century. Dissatisfied with conventional social norms, the German expressionists rejected academic conceptions of idealized, timeless beauty and instead pursued daring artistic strategies that would both reflect and contribute to revolutionary change. The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy presents insights into the work of these inventive artists and their continuing impact in the 21st century. Many of these artists were drawn to the expressive possibilities of printmaking. They achieved a range of textures and tonalities in their prints, from the fine, velvety lines of drypoint to the alternating crisply splintered or gesturally gouged marks of woodcut, and from the granular crayon and wash-like drawing effects of lithography to the subtle shifts in continuous tone that are possible in aquatint. Additionally, the various approaches to applying ink and use of different color inks in their prints were well suited to the artists’ desire to experiment with materials.

The exhibition is on view in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art. It features more than 100 prints, drawings, illustrated books, portfolios, and two sculptures. The works range in date from 1908 to 2021. All of the works, including recent acquisitions and works that have rarely been on view, are drawn from the National Gallery’s permanent collection. Works by such well-known artists as Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Käthe Kollwitz, Emil Nolde, and Egon Schiele will be seen alongside prints by lesser-known artists, including Paul Gangolf, Walter Gramatté, and Otto Mueller.

“This exhibition invites visitors to consider the striking parallels between the intensity of human emotion and experience conveyed in the work of the German expressionists during a transformational historic period in the early 20th century and current responses to the cultural and political shifts taking place in our world today,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art.

Divided into four thematic sections, The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy features works of art that focus on portraits and modern life; nature and spirituality; relationships and body language; and the “legacy” of German expressionism. This exhibition shares insights drawn from the increased understanding we now have of the complexities and impact of World War I, which concluded more than a century ago in 1918. It also introduces new approaches to broadening conventional art historical narratives. Artists working in Germany and Austria in the 1910s and 1920s challenged themselves to create expressive strategies for making art that reflected a heightened understanding and authentic representation of human experience amidst rapid social, cultural, and geopolitical transformations. The final room of the exhibition explores these ideas in the work of later artists whose similar approaches to mark making, materials, and sense of immediacy have been employed to respond to comparable circumstances and concerns—the most strikingly analogous circumstances being those facing contemporary artists working today.

Walter Gramatté

Die grosse Angst (Selbstportrat, Kopf im Halbprofil nach rechts), 1918

Drypoint with extensive additions in watercolor

Sheet: 30 x 23.81 cm (11 13/16 x 9 3/8 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, 

Gift of Christopher and Beverly With 

in memory of Karl and Gerda With

The first room features penetrating portraits and self-portraits that focus on inner thoughts and emotional states of being rather than realistic accuracy of appearance. These works draw on concepts that were then emerging about personality traits and states of mind as developed by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, groundbreaking psychology scholars and philosophers in the early 20th century. The incisive diagonals, quavering lines, and gnarled fingers of the figure in Die Grosse Angst (The Great Anxiety), Walter Gramatté’s 1918 self-portrait, and the close cropping and gouged, carved, and scratched marks that define the facial features in the woodcut portrait Fanny Wocke (1916) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner demonstrate the ways artists used the characteristics of different media to impart emotional intensity. Prints and illustrated books by Max Beckmann, Lovis Corinth, Otto Dix, Paul Gangolf, and George Grosz convey the emotional and political timbre of the time by showing the dynamics of modern life, increasingly congested cities and the accompanying sense of isolation and anonymity within them, dissatisfaction with the existing social order and bourgeois values, and the horrors of World War I.

The second gallery presents the religious subjects and landscapes that artists pursued in seeking refuge from the complexities and stress of daily life on one hand, while questioning faith and humankind’s destructive impact on the world on the other. Some of the highlights in this section include Lovis Corinth’s and Otto Mueller’s representations of the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, Karl Schmidt-Rotluff’s dazzling pink and green woodcut of rocky mountains, and Emil Nolde’s murky view of the harbor in Hamburg, Germany.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Two Women (Zwei Frauen), 1914

Color lithograph printed in black and orange

image: 42 x 32 cm (16 9/16 x 12 5/8 in.)

sheet: 53.8 x 41.9 cm (21 3/16 x 16 1/2 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Ruth Cole Kainen

Emil Nolde

Dancer (Tänzerin), 1913

5-color lithograph on japan paper

sheet: 60.2 x 77.5 cm (23 11/16 x 30 1/2 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund

Egon Schiele

Standing Nude with a Patterned Robe, 1917

gouache and black crayon on buff paper

sheet: 29.3 x 45.9 cm (11 9/16 x 18 1/16 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, 

Gift of The Robert and Mary M. Looker Family Collection

The German expressionists were fascinated by the ways gestures and movement could signify love, fear, sorrow, joy, and other aspects of people’s emotional state or personality. The different approaches these artists explored to depict the body, sexuality, and interpersonal relationships are featured in the third gallery. The tensions that can arise between husband and wife are represented by the green band that cuts horizontally across the composition in Walter Gramatté’s The Couple (Self-Portrait with Wife) of 1922. Love and security are felt in Käthe Kollwitz’s bronze relief In God’s Hands (1935/1936), which shows a small child protectively enveloped in the arms of an adult (represented only by a pair of hands). Counter to the traditional academic depictions of idealized nudes, these artists embraced a range of body types and discomforting positions, from the exaggeratedly puckered colorful surface of Egon Schiele’s Standing Nude with Patterned Robe (1917) to the awkwardly posed model kneeling on a rug in Erich Heckel’s Nude (c. 1913). Sources of inspiration include the art of Africa and the South Pacific Islands, which were inaccurately viewed through the bias of colonialism as “primitive” societies untainted by “civilization.” Elongated and exaggerated shapes, and the manner of articulation of certain features, as seen in the front-facing figure in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s lithograph Two Women (1914) and his rough-hewn wooden sculpture Head of a Woman (1913), and the dynamic movement in Emil Nolde’s color lithograph Dancer (Tänzerin) (1913) demonstrate the artists’ investigation of what they misinterpreted as “primal” aesthetic sensibilities that express vital forces of human experience.

Rashid Johnson

Untitled Anxious Red, 2021

Screenprint on wove paper

Image and sheet: 57.5 x 77.4 cm (22 5/8 x 30 1/2 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund

The final room presents the legacy of German expressionism and how artists continue to draw upon its stylistic approaches to convey the heightened emotional and psychological experiences that accompany transformational moments in society. Among the highlights is Leonard Baskin’s The Hydrogen Man (1954), whose one-armed transparent figure, rendered in an intricate network of woodcut lines, warns of the ravages of modern nuclear warfare. Rashid Johnson’s grid of highly abstract boxes of “scribbled” faces fills the composition Untitled Anxious Red (2021), which was created during the COVID pandemic. It captures not only the elevated fear of contracting a deadly disease but also the challenge of negotiating the anxiety of being a Black man in America with tensions heightened by the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Among the National Gallery’s recent acquisitions are Nicole Eisenman’s Beer Garden (2012–2017), which combines self-portraiture with various “types” of caricatured figures that recall Max Beckmann’s prints in the first gallery, and Orit Hofshi’s Time… thou ceaseless lackey to eternity (2017), in which the artist, standing in a landscape ravaged by war and climate change, is surrounded by displaced people seeking refuge and a path to a better future.

The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, which is the only venue, and is curated by Shelley Langdale, curator and head of modern and contemporary prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 

nga.gov