Exhibitions in Washington, DC

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.

National Museum of Asian ArtFree

Edo-period maki-e lacquer from the collection of philanthropist Jacqueline Avant: gold-on-black hairpins, combs, boxes and a princess's litter.

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.

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

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.

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.