‘Making Their Mark,’ a Roll Call of Modern Art Influence, Now at NMWA
At the National Museum for Women in the Arts, the intellectually intricate Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection has arrived and will be on view through July 26, 2026.
Bringing together roughly 80 works by nearly 70 artists, the show reads like a roll call of modern and contemporary influence, from Magdalena Abakanowicz to Kara Walker. Across painting, sculpture, textiles, and installation, the exhibition threads together eight decades of art-making that resists easy categorization.
Still, the offerings are organized into seven thematically attuned sections. Among them, “Craft is Art,” “Disobedient Bodies,” “Gestural Abstraction,” “Luminous Abstraction,” “Of Selves and Spirits,” “The Power of Form,” and “Pixelated Abstraction.”
Overall, the exhibition favors dialogue over division. Works by artists like Joan Mitchell and Amy Sillman are placed in conversation, tracing intergenerational echoes and aesthetic evolutions. Elsewhere, figures such as Faith Ringgold and Lorna Simpson probe identity and narrative.
What emerges is a richly layered reconsideration of art history — not as a rigid timeline, but as a shifting, interconnected web. The exhibition consistently challenges hierarchies, particularly the long-standing divide between “fine art” and “craft.” Textile, beadwork, and ceramic pieces are given equal footing, their materiality underscoring the ingenuity and intentionality often overlooked in traditional canons.
There’s a tactile thoughtfulness throughout, an insistence on process, on material, and on meaning, that rewards close looking. And while the scope is sweeping, the curation remains carefully calibrated, allowing each piece to contribute to the larger, more inclusive narrative.
Making Their Mark is more than a showcase of influential artists; it’s a re-mapping of influence itself.
ProTip: Don’t miss lingering over one of our favorites, a work from 2022 by Howardena Pindell, which incorporates hundreds of small, paper circles adhered to the canvas.
