January 2026
January 2026 at a glance: 1 exhibition opened, 0 closed, and 15 more were on view across the city.

Glenstone MuseumFreePast
Bronzes by Simone Leigh in Room 1 of the Pavilions: Sentinel (Mami Wata), the portrait Sharifa, and Last Garment, installed in the Water Court and visible from the gallery.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

National Museum of American HistoryFree
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 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 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.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.