There is more than one origin story surrounding the National Museum of Women in the Arts, an institution almost synonymous with its founder, Wilhelmina Holladay, who became a legendary figure in Washington social circles.
According to the official history, the first foundation stone for the museum was laid in Europe in the late 1970s. In Vienna, Holladay and her husband Wallace discovered the work of Clara Peeters, a Flemish painter and contemporary of Rembrandt. Another encounter with Peeters followed in the Prado Museum in Madrid. But when Holladay consulted HW Janson’s History of Art, a chronicle of Western painting, she could not mention Peeters or any other artist.
This revelation led to Holladay’s life’s work: He set the record straight by building an art collection that culminated in the country’s first major museum dedicated exclusively to women artists.
Former museum staff remember her telling a different story: The Holladays were torn between two still life paintings. Aesthetically it was a close call, but one was available for a quarter of the price. The art dealer explained that the reduced painting was painted by a woman. The Holladays found their advantage as investors and collectors.
On October 21, the National Museum of Women in the Arts will reopen its doors after a two-year renovation. This will happen without its founder: Holladay died in March 2021 at the age of 98, a few months before the break. Given the scope of the $67.5 million restoration work on its building, a former Masonic temple that was once barred to women, the museum had to become a very different institution. But now it must make do without a matriarch whose sense of status and community has guided virtually every decision in the institution’s nearly 40-year history.
“Billie was the museum,” said Winton Holladay, Wilhelmina’s daughter-in-law, who replaced her as the museum’s board chair.
The museum’s 6,000-work collection, which ranges from Renaissance portraits to video installations, is still tied together by a loose thread of gender. The permanent collection has been redesigned in a new, open format that emphasizes the building’s 1908 flat iron frame, suggesting how the museum might step out of its founder’s shadow.
The social context of the museum has also changed dramatically. Women are no longer completely excluded from museum surveys or gallery exhibitions. The Women’s Museum has a more established position today than it did when it opened in 1987, when Holladay’s vision was seen by feminists as ghettoizing and by elites as radical.
“She liked the fact that the museum was centrist, as she called it, because there were a lot of people on both sides who were angry,” said Susan Fisher Sterling, the museum’s director since 2008, referring to Holladay . “She felt that controversy ultimately helped establish the museum as a place to be reckoned with.”
Even though her museum had no precedent, Holladay remained committed to the vision of a nonpartisan institution in Washington. “An art museum shouldn’t deal with politics, abortion or homosexuality,” she said the year it opened — perhaps not a surprising view for a Rockefeller Republican, but an example of how she distanced herself from the feminist firmament. Sometimes her instincts led to conflict with staff. For example, the directors were not authorized to appoint members of the museum board, which remained entirely within Holladay’s purview. (All were women and part of Holladay’s social circle.)
“The staff senses that you are not the final authority. I would make decisions and they would say, ‘What does Ms. Holladay think about this?'” Judy L. Larson, director of the museum from 2002 to 2007, said in a recent interview. “It interferes with your agency.”
At times, the founder also took on the role of curator by suggesting exhibitions that the employees were expected to hold or by being annoyed by exhibitions that, in her opinion, crossed social boundaries. “She usually gave us complete freedom to do whatever we wanted to do — until she saw the show,” Larson said. “Then it would be like this: How did this happen?”
Holladay’s vision for the National Museum of Women in the Arts was elegant and embodied in the museum’s Great Hall. The building’s neoclassical proportions, now restored by Baltimore architectural firm Sandra Vicchio & Associates, still evoke the Georgetown establishment of which Holladay was a part. A surreal chandelier by the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, which hangs in the rotunda, now forms a contrast to the elegant hall. The museum’s only Frida Kahlo painting hangs in pride of place on the mezzanine, reached via the grandiose double marble staircase. (Or by elevator: The museum is now fully accessible under the Americans With Disabilities Act.)
Kahlo’s painting “Self-Portrait, Dedicated to Leon Trotsky” (1937) came to Holladay via the playwright, ambassador and doyen Clare Boothe Luce. She visited Kahlo in her studio in Mexico City when the artist learned of Trotsky’s assassination. According to Winton Holladay, Kahlo was moved to destroy the canvas, but Luce persuaded her to part with it instead. Back in Washington, Luce called Wilhelmina Holladay to her Watergate apartment with the promise of a gift she refused to believe.
Holladay promoted benefactors from throughout Washington society and beyond. The museum’s early advisors included sculptor Louise Nevelson, designer Diane von Furstenberg and socialite Lamia Khashoggi, wife of billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, then the world’s richest man.
“She was an absolute force of nature,” lobbyist and collector Tony Podesta said of Holladay. He donated around 500 works to the museum. “I’m still at it,” he said. “I give the men to the National Gallery and the women to the Women’s Museum.”
For the reopening, the curators mixed up the collection. A section called “Fiber Optics,” for example, includes a thread sculpture by Sonya Clark and a quilt by Faith Ringgold, while in “Home, Maker,” an 18th-century silver spoon by Hester Bateman sits next to a cheeky 1990 tea set by photographer Cindy see is Sherman. A curving marble sculpture, Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Pregnant Nana” (1993), will greet viewers in the galleries – not the popular Dutch Golden Age still life paintings of Peeters.
“If I don’t have to do this parade through the centuries, I can show everything,” said chief curator Kathryn Wat.
The new perspective highlights artists the museum championed long before they were discovered by other institutions, including Amy Sherald, who painted Michelle Obama’s portrait, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum this year of American Art had year. Next fall, the Women’s Museum will conduct the first East Coast survey of Guyanese-born artist Suchitra Mattai, exhibiting her mixed-media installations alongside historical artifacts from institutional collections that may shed light on her work.
Despite the museum’s ambitions, its thematic approach can still be described as neutral – and sometimes it is prone to errors. For example, a gallery called Seeing Red combines a 2022 sculpture by Alison Saar with a 1580 painting by Lavinia Fontana based on their shared hue.
“I’ll be honest with you,” Wat said. “When we had the idea of creating a color-based gallery, we looked at each other and asked ourselves: Is this completely cheesy? Is that the lowest common denominator?”
With the renovation, the museum increased its gallery space by 15 percent, primarily by consolidating office areas. The special exhibition “The Sky’s the Limit” seems intended to showcase the museum’s new musculature: many works in this exhibition of large-scale sculptures by contemporary artists hang from the ceiling.
The museum in no way abandons Holladay’s vision. Sterling said the work has only just begun: She points to a database compiled by journalists Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin that shows that artworks by artists who identify as women accounted for just 11 percent of museum purchases between 2008 and 2020 The US accounted for just 3 percent of global auction sales during this period. The numbers for black female artists are even bleaker.
“People in the art world always think we’re getting to equality faster than we are,” Sterling said. “We’re still a long way from getting there when 89 percent of acquisitions are men’s work.”
Rania Matar, a Boston-based photographer who also works in Beirut, is one of eight artists featured in a series of short films on view in a new first-floor gallery. She said in an interview that the museum has shown her work twice before, including portraits she made of Lebanese and Palestinian girls living in refugee camps. One of the artist’s subjects (from “Rayven, Miami Beach, Florida”) came to the museum to see her portrait. Matar said the museum “treated her like a queen.”
Is the Women’s Museum still relevant?
For Matar, his value is clear. “As a woman who makes work about women — most of my work focuses on growing up, aging and motherhood — it’s pretty important to be in the museum,” she said. “I’d be upset if I wasn’t.”