31 October 2026
Clifford Ross's digital waves leave the National Gallery rotunda on 18 October; six days later the Phillips opens Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea, so the coastless capital keeps a sea. The Folger opens To Hear Her Speak, the National Museum of Women in the Arts Beverly Pepper, and Nick Cave's new Soundsuit is at Glenstone all month.
The Phillips CollectionOpens 24 October
Around 90 works trace the friendship Avery, Gottlieb and Rothko built over shared summers in Gloucester, 1920s to mid-1960s, many never shown publicly before. The summer-house plan most friend groups never take past the group chat.
Folger Shakespeare LibraryOpens 16 October
Some 100 photographs, playbills, diaries and costumes follow 450 years of Black women taking on Shakespeare, from Phillis Wheatley to Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. Curated by Patricia Akhimie.
National Museum of Women in the ArtsOpens 23 October
Gallery-scale sculptures, maquettes and a new film on Beverly Pepper, paired with her monumental pieces on New York Avenue, right outside the door. Small versions inside, full size on the way out.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenOpens 16 October
Six bodies of abstract photography the photographer and teacher Carlotta Corpron made in Texas from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, drawn from a recent gift of 48 prints.
Glenstone MuseumFree
Nick Cave's largest multi-figure Soundsuit yet: eleven forms joined by hand-sewn mother-of-pearl buttons, with headpieces shaped like gramophone horns. Free, with timed tickets booked in advance.
National Gallery of ArtCloses 18 October
A 23-foot screen under the West Building's Rotunda dome, where Clifford Ross builds breaking ocean waves out of millions of glowing pixels. The closest surf to the National Mall.
National Museum of the American IndianUntil 18 January
Feather Canoe is a canoe outline of peeled willow saplings with white feathers suspended inside. Nearly 50 works by the Hoocąk sculptor in willow, feathers and pigment, standing in for the rivers and waterfalls of his Wisconsin woods.
National Air and Space MuseumFree
NASA invited Rauschenberg to watch the Apollo 11 launch, and the lithographs he made from it hang by a Combine with a taxidermied eagle. Thirty works on flight, several never shown before, in an aerospace museum, not an art one.
National Archives MuseumCloses 28 October
A note reading "Don't Say Anything Yet", from the moment President Bush learned of the attacks, beside previously unseen US Coast Guard photographs of Ground Zero. A short vault rotation in the East Rotunda Gallery.
National Portrait GalleryFree
More than twenty portraits of musicians, dancers and actors, mostly paintings and sculpture from the past century: Paul Robeson, Katharine Hepburn, Dizzy Gillespie, Maria Callas, LL Cool J.
National Gallery of ArtFree
Remarkable early photographs of and by Black Americans that tell powerful stories of identity, resilience, and self-representation. West Building.
National Portrait GalleryFree
The photographs department turns fifty with more than one hundred works spanning the daguerreian era to the digital age.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenFree
A century of upheaval across the second-floor outer ring: hundreds of works by Bacon, Dubuffet, Krasner, Lawrence, O'Keeffe and Pollock, rotated periodically and threaded with contemporary responses.
Smithsonian American Art MuseumFree
A ten-minute animation in which a British East India Company man dissolves into shifting Indo-Persian miniatures, scored by Pulitzer-winning composer Du Yun.
The Phillips Collection
Artwork by older adults living with memory loss, made through the museum's Creative Aging programme of gallery conversations followed by studio practice, with local senior centres and Reframing Care.
IA&A at HillyerFree
Over two dozen artists and writers from six countries take on wildlife conservation through creatures of flight. Curated by Heather McMordie for the nonprofit Creature Conserve.
National Museum of Asian ArtFree
The Uzbek artist's first major US solo show: video works and photographs tracing Central Asia's landscapes, oral histories and Soviet-era ruins.
IA&A at HillyerFree
Diana Mercado gathers 16 paintings from her London shows Memories of the Andes (2023) and A Tale of the Andes (2025), bridged by a new work and a poem written for the exhibition.
IA&A at HillyerFree
Katherine Steichen Rosing suspends dozens of 10-foot linen columns, inked and charred by candle flame, into a walk-through ghost forest, with video of woodland thickening with carbon.
American University Museum at the Katzen Arts CenterFree
A major solo show filling the museum's second and third floors with the Korean artist's paintings, sculpture and multimedia, centred on his Taxidermy series on mortality.
American University Museum at the Katzen Arts CenterFree
Presented by the Alper Initiative for Washington Art: black-and-white street photographs Carr made after a forty-year legal career, building layered compositions out of reflections in DC and abroad.
American University Museum at the Katzen Arts CenterFree
Large-scale mixed-media paintings by the contemporary Islamic calligrapher, turning Qur'anic verses and divine names into layered surfaces of metallic leaf, texture and intricate script.
National Gallery of ArtFree
Over 30 works — Jasper Johns, Faith Ringgold, Gordon Parks, Childe Hassam, Dorothea Lange — on how the Stars and Stripes has served as pride, protest and raw material since the late 1800s.
American University Museum at the Katzen Arts CenterFree
A Project Space show of two digital graphic narratives by AU's professor emerita of art history, played out on monitors: a travelling Miami palm tree, and the Odyssey retold around its women.
National Gallery of ArtFree
Photographs, poems and film in which Ho-Chunk artist Sky Hopinka threads together family, language, place and lived Indigenous experience.
The Kreeger Museum
Seven Hamiltonian Artists alumni test boundaries across painting, photo, sculpture, video and installation, shown beside Kreeger works by Sam Gilliam, Frank Stella and Simmie Knox.
National Museum of American HistoryFree
The museum's semiquincentennial blockbuster: 250 objects across all three floors, from Jefferson's writing desk to the 1776 gunboat Philadelphia. Closes at the end of 2026 (exact date not yet announced).
National Gallery of ArtFree
See the Great Depression-era Index of American Design through the eyes of today's college students, in the East Building Library Atrium.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenFree
Pendleton's first solo show in Washington, DC fills the second-floor inner ring with new and recent paintings plus a single-channel video, staged for the museum's circular galleries.
National Gallery of ArtFree
Four paintings across six centuries — Titian, Cezanne and Rozeal. — hung together to show how artists answer the art history they inherit.
Smithsonian American Art MuseumFree
Nick Cave remakes the galleries as a dig site: crafted mammoth hides and bones, a video of the beasts come alive, and hundreds of found objects laid out like specimens.
Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens
The first exhibition devoted to Hillwood's textiles: 17th-century point de France lace, an 18th-century pearl-trimmed Russian liturgical panel, and new fibre work by Manca Ahlin and Sophia Narrett.
National Portrait GalleryFree
An encore hang of 20 vintage prints by MGM's in-house glamour portraitist — Garbo, Harlow, Crawford, Gable and Dietrich, lit to look immortal.
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Over 80 quilts trace the Second Great Migration west, carried as warmth, ancestral memory and emblems of cultural survival by Black families settling in California.
National Museum of Asian ArtFree
Twenty-six Islamic masterpieces from the Louvre, from Spain to India and the 7th to 19th centuries, including the Mamluk basin known as the Baptistery of Saint Louis.
National Museum of the American IndianFree
The first major retrospective of Hoocąk sculptor Truman Lowe: nearly 50 works in willow, feathers and pigment that evoke the rivers, waterfalls and canoes of the Wisconsin woodlands.
The Phillips Collection
Around 90 works from the 1920s to the mid-1960s tracing the friendship of Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, forged over shared summers in Gloucester. Many shown publicly for the first time.
Dumbarton Oaks Museum & GardensFree
A vivid portrait of Robert Woods Bliss as an early twentieth-century collector, drawn from the estate's own holdings. Special Exhibitions Gallery.
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Marlo Pascual (1972-2020) enlarged, shattered and folded anonymous thrift-store photographs into uncanny Plexiglas sculptures that blur the line between picture and object.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenFree
Six bodies of work made in Texas between the late 1930s and early 1950s by the abstract photographer and teacher Carlotta Corpron, drawn from a recent gift of 48 prints plus loans.
National Museum of African American History and CultureFree
Black religious life seen through Johnson Publishing Company photographs from Ebony and Jet, where the holy and the profane meet in music, protest and pop culture.
Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens
A long-term loan portrait of Lloyd Walton Patterson, who travelled to Soviet Russia in 1932 for the film Black and White and stayed, opening up the history of Black Americans in the USSR.
Smithsonian American Art MuseumFree
225 photographs from the NEA's Bicentennial-era survey projects, reuniting a 1970s portrait of America and setting it against federal survey photography going back to the 19th century.
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Gallery-scale sculptures, maquettes and a new film on Beverly Pepper (1922-2020), pairing with her outdoor installation along New York Avenue right outside the museum's door.
Folger Shakespeare LibraryFree
Curated by Patricia Akhimie, some 100 photographs, playbills, diaries and costumes trace 450 years of Black women engaging Shakespeare, from Phillis Wheatley to Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison.
National Portrait GalleryFree
The museum turns its lens on its own building: the early Patent Office, told through portraits of Andrew Jackson, Samuel Morse and Lincoln, the only president to hold a patent.
Library of CongressFree
Library collections trace how Americans have argued with, rallied around and reached for the Declaration of Independence — its ideals of equality, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenFree
Ten room-swallowing installations trace immersive art from the late 1960s on — Flavin, Gilliam, Irwin, Pape and Long, then Chan, Eliasson, Finch, Johnson and Rottenberg. Five shown here for the first time.
National Archives MuseumFree
America250 show marking the Declaration's 250th anniversary, in three parts: the Revolution, the preservation of the original parchment, and how Americans have celebrated independence since 1776.
National Gallery of ArtFree
What does it mean to have a "homeland" when it's shaped by movement, memory, and change? East Building Mezzanine.
National Museum of Asian ArtFree
How Charles Lang Freer used his Detroit home as a proving ground for what became the first national art museum of the United States.
National Portrait GalleryFree
New portraits of the 2025 award winners — Jamie Dimon, Temple Grandin, Joy Harjo and Steven Spielberg — including commissions by David Lenz and Kate Capshaw.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenFree
Three towering white aluminium heads by Yoshitomo Nara, enlarged from small 2021 clay heads, open the revitalized Sculpture Garden's West Lawn series.
National Museum of American HistoryFree
The overlooked history of a trailblazing Filipino community in California, from the 1910s to the 1970s.
Anacostia Community MuseumFree
Ahead of the museum's 60th anniversary, this show asks how Washingtonians keep their own history - anchored by the diary of Adam Francis Plummer, with letters, photographs and hands-on archiving stations.
Library of CongressFree
Highlights from the American Folklife Center's 50 years of collecting: recordings, photos and objects on the living traditions of food, play, work and place.
National Museum of Women in the Arts
The museum-wide collection installation, rejecting chronology for themes like Photo Credit, Seeing Red and Objectified across six continents and six centuries of women artists.
National Museum of the American IndianFree
Original treaties on loan from the National Archives, wampum belts and peace medals tell the story of US–Native diplomacy from the colonial era to the present.
National Portrait GalleryFree
Nine modern prints struck from Mathew Brady's original Civil War-era negatives — Lincoln, Hawthorne, Grant and Emma, Queen of Hawai'i — shown with a glass plate and Brady's wooden storage box.
National Museum of American HistoryFree
From the streets of Havana to the dance floors of New York and beyond, this bilingual show traces how salsa grew into a defining sound of the United States.
National Museum of Asian ArtFree
On the Freer plaza facing the National Mall, a monumental empty plinth held aloft by hundreds of small striding figures, questioning who monuments are for.
National Museum of Natural HistoryFree
America's national mammal, from 100,000 years of shaping the prairie to near-extinction and recovery. A six-foot bull bison, an ancient bison skull and a North American prairie soundscape.
National Museum of Natural HistoryFree
More than 600 specimens and cultural belongings from all 50 states, DC and five US territories — fossils, minerals and treasures chosen to represent every corner of the country.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.
