In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, 250 Years: American Women Artists and the Nation's Story traces the nation's artistic history through the remarkable achievements of American women artists. Spanning from the Revolutionary era to the present day, the exhibition highlights artists who worked despite the social, educational, and professional barriers that often limited women's participation in the arts. Through portraiture, landscape, still life, abstraction, sculpture, and contemporary practice, 250 Years reveals the remarkable continuity of artistic achievement that has helped shape American culture since the nation's founding.
Beginning with eighteenth-century decorative arts and early nineteenth-century works by pioneering miniaturists including Mary Way, Anna Claypoole Peale, Sarah Goodridge, Eliza Goodridge, Susannah Paine, and Clarissa Peters, the exhibition traces the emergence of professional women artists in the young republic. The exhibition continues through the nineteenth century with works by Sarah Miriam Peale, Mary Jane Peale, Julie Hart Beers, Mary Russell Smith, Laura Woodward, and Cecilia Beaux, artists who expanded the possibilities for women within portraiture, still life, and landscape painting. Twentieth-century highlights include paintings and sculpture by Louise Cox, Harriet Whitney Frishmuth, Grace Hill Turnbull, Natalie Van Vleck, Georgina Klitgaard, Virginia Berresford, Juanita Guccione, Mercedes Matter, Diana Kurz, Sherron Francis, and Harmony Hammond. The exhibition culminates with works by contemporary artists including Emmi Whitehorse and Margaret Thompson, demonstrating the continuing vitality and diversity of women's contributions to American art in the twenty-first century.
As the United States commemorates its semiquincentennial, the exhibition invites visitors to reconsider the nation's history through a lens of artistic achievement, highlighting the individuals whose contributions have too often remained underrepresented within traditional narratives of American art.