This is a small sampling of women artists and their works in the vast visual arts collections of the Smithsonian. American women photographers have also made their mark. The Smithsonian tells the stories of women within our museums and beyond our walls, critically examining the past and highlighting art and artists who might have been overlooked historically.

Backtalk: Artists on Native, African, and African American Stereotypes is part of a collaborative, broad-reaching examination on the persistence of racial and cultural stereotypes. Following the vision of Johnnetta Betsch Cole, director emerita, National Museum of African Art (NMAfA), to examine stereotypes across cultures, this online exhibition explores how select visual artists interrogate and engage racial and cultural stereotypes in their creative practice.

In Betye Saar’s work, time is cyclical. History and experiences, emotion and knowledge travel across time and back again, linking the artist and viewers of her work with generations of people who came before them. This is made explicit in her commitment to certain themes, imagery, and objects, and her continual reinvention of them over decades. “I can no longer separate the work by saying this deals with the occult and this deals with shamanism or this deals with so and so…. It’s all together and it’s just my work,” she said in 1989.1

Bisa Butler is an award winning African American textile artist. She is known for her vibrantly stunning larger than life sized quilted portraits that captivate viewers around the world.

The National Portrait Gallery, with its mission to tell the history of the United States through the images and biographies of those who have contributed to its formation, development, and present reality, is a museum of history and art, whose centerpiece has always been America’s Presidents. In recognition of the innumerable contributions made by women to our history and culture, the portraits of the nation’s first ladies have become the most requested by the public.

With a design inspired by zines, the Girlhood exhibition featured five story sections: Education (Being Schooled), Wellness (Body Talk), Work (Hey, Where’s My Girlhood?), Fashion (Girl’s Remix), plus seven biographical interactives stories, A Girl’s Life. The design featured custom murals and illustrations by artist Krystal Quiles.

Sharing the stories of our nation through American art and craft to inspire reflection, spark dialogue, and build connection.

Kara Elizabeth Walker (born November 26, 1969) is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, printmaker, installation artist, filmmaker, and professor who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1997, at the age of 28, becoming one of the youngest ever recipients of the award. She has been the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University since 2015. Walker is regarded as among the most prominent and acclaimed Black American artists working today.

I feel I exist on the boundaries, somewhere between science and art, art and architecture, public and private, East and West. I am always trying to find a balance between these opposing forces, the place where opposites meet. —Maya Ying Lin

More than reflecting the need for social change, the works in this exhibition project and revise notions of Chicanx identity, spur political activism and school viewers in new understandings of U.S. and international history. By employing diverse visual and artistic modes from satire, to portraiture, appropriation, conceptualism, and politicized pop, the artists in this exhibition build an enduring and inventive graphic tradition that has yet to be fully integrated into the history of U.S. printmaking.

What is Surrealism? And what did it become in the hands of women artists? The Surrealist gallery is one of the most visited in the Museum. Surrealism connects our daily lives to the world of fantasy, dreams, and desire. While figures like Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Max Ernst are often the names that come to mind, a host of intriguing women were associated with the Surrealist movement that emerged between the World Wars, including Claude Cahun, Frida Kahlo, Dora Maar, Meret Oppenheim, and Remedios Varo. These artists both championed Surrealist ideas and pushed against them to create work in which they could explore their unconscious mind and worldly identity.

Renowned for her figurative work across mediums, Mutu is committed to reshaping the narratives of womanhood; by doing so, she challenges Western culture’s racist and misogynistic tenets.