Exhibitions in Washington, DC

Smithsonian American Art Museum · Free

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.

National Portrait Gallery · Free

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 Gallery of Art · Free

A 23-foot screen under the West Building's Rotunda dome, where Clifford Ross builds breaking ocean waves out of millions of glowing pixels.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden · Free

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 Museum · Free

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.

National Gallery of Art · Free

Four paintings across six centuries — Titian, Cezanne and Rozeal. — hung together to show how artists answer the art history they inherit.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden · Free

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 Museum of the American Indian · Free

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.

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.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden · Free

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 Portrait Gallery · Free

New portraits of the 2025 award winners — Jamie Dimon, Temple Grandin, Joy Harjo and Steven Spielberg — including commissions by David Lenz and Kate Capshaw.

National Museum of American History · Free

The overlooked history of a trailblazing Filipino community in California, from the 1910s to the 1970s.

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 Indian · Free

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 Gallery · Free

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 Asian Art · Free

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.