History’s great women artists have, in recent years, received glimmers of the institutional attention they’ve long deserved. While Hilma af Klint and Artemisia Gentileschi have broken through to the mainstream with major museum exhibitions, still many more influential and daring talents are waiting to be rediscovered by the wider public. Enthusiasm and momentum continue to grow for these stories, thankfully, and this year, a number of museums big and small have turned their attention to their work. Below, we’ve selected just a few of the solo exhibitions highlighting historic women artists worth seeking out this fall.
1. “Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch” at Spelman College, Atlanta
Through December 6, 2025
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, (1929). Gift of Miss Eleanor Green and Miss Ellen D. Sharpe. Courtesy of Spelman College.
Born to a Narragansett father and a Black mother, sculptor Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890–1960) was the first woman of color to graduate from the acclaimed Rhode Island School of Design. Her career would take her to New York and Paris. Still, throughout her lifetime, the Afro-Indigenous artist navigated an often-hostile art world and struggled, at times, with extreme poverty. She nevertheless continued to produce sculptures of intense poignancy and precise technical skill. “I Will Not Bend an Inch,” co-curated by the RISD Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, now makes its third stop in Atlanta; the exhibition is the first museum presentation of Prophet’s works, many of which have, unfortunately, been lost or destroyed over the decades. Twenty rare works make up the exhibition, including nine portrait heads carved in hardwood, as well as marble carvings, reliefs, and works on paper. These works are a testament to a remarkable and unyielding artistic vision and one deserving of much wider scholarly attention.
2. “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” at Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI
Through December 23, 2025
Toshiko Takaezu with works later combined in the “Star Series” (ca. 1994–2001), including (from left to right) ,, , , and , 1998. Photo: Tom Grotta, © Family of Toshiko Takaezu, Courtesy browngrotta arts
Interest in American artist Toshiko Takaezu has ignited over the past few years, driven in part by this very exhibition, which originated at the Noguchi Museum in New York last spring. Takaezu, who was born in Hawai‘i of Okinawan heritage, is best known for her glazed “closed form” ceramic sculptures. These forms ranged in scale from the handheld to the monumental; she approached these vessels as her three-dimensional canvases painting onto their surfaces. Takaezu was known for arranging her works to create unique environments. Her practice also incorporated weaving and bronze-cast sculpture, also highlighted in the exhibition. In some ways, this exhibition is a homecoming for Takaezu; the artist taught at UW-Madison from 1954 to 1955.
3. “Edmonia Lewis: Indelible Impressions” at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford
Through January 4, 2026
Edmonia Lewis, Asleep, (1871). Photo: John Janca.
Sculptor Edmonia Lewis, a 19th-century woman of Black and Native American (Ojibwe) heritage, was internationally famous in her own time, celebrated for her stirring Neoclassical marble sculptures. Visitors to her studio included President Ulysses S. Grant, Pope Pius IX, and Frederick Douglass.
Born in upstate New York in 1844, Lewis briefly enrolled in Oberlin College (one of the few schools to accept Black women), before moving to Boston in 1863, where she began her career. By 1866, Lewis had set sail for Rome, where she studied alongside the most celebrated sculptors of her time.
In 1873, she visited the Bay Area, where she presented her sculptures, Asleep (1871), Awake (1872), and Bust of Abraham Lincoln (1871), to great acclaim. These three sculptures are presented reunited for the first time in three decades in an intimate exhibition. The show marks an important moment of renewed interest in Lewis. Early next year, the Peabody Essex Museum will present “Said in Stone” which positions Lewis’s works alongside those of her contemporaries in an expansive 100-object exhibition.
4. “Lee Miller” at Tate Britain, London
Through February 15, 2026
Lee Miller, (ca.1943). © Lee Miller Archives, England 2024. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk
The mania for all things Lee Miller reaches its zenith. The surrealist photographer and war journalist has been everywhere in culture over the last few years, from the release of Lee, a biopic of her life starring Kate Winslet, an exhibition of her works at Gagosian New York, and the publication of a book of her correspondence with her husband, Arthur Penrose.
Now, Tate Britain has opened the most extensive retrospective of her photography in the U.K. to date. The exhibition includes approximately 250 vintage and modern prints, from her years in Paris’s Surrealist scene to her unflinching bravery as a war photographer documenting World War II. The exhibition also includes rarely seen works, such as a series of Egyptian landscapes taken in the 1930s. The highlights are her tender and unusual portraits of fellow artists.
5. “Michaelina Wautier, Painter,” at Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Through February 22, 2026
Michaelina Wautier, Der Triumph des Bacchus. Image Courtesy of © KHM-Museumsverband.
For centuries, Michaelina Wautier’s paintings were attributed to men, particularly her brother, the artist Carl Wautier. The Flemish Baroque painter, who lived from 1604 to 1689, worked across a dazzling range of genres, from portraits and history scenes to flower still lifes and religious tableaux. Historians doubted a woman would have had that ability. Wautier could have been lost to history if art historian Katlijne Van der Stighelen hadn’t found a painting by Wautier in a storage area of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum back in 1993. The discovery set Van der Stighelen on a decades-long mission to discover Wauter’s story. Now, in a fitting moment, the Kunsthistorisches Museum is hosting the largest exhibition of Wautier’s works to date, with 29 paintings, a drawing, and a print—the near entirety of her known work—on view. The star of the exhibition is arguably her monumental Triumph of Bacchus (1655–59), which some historians believe includes a goddess-like (and provocative) depiction of the artist herself.
6. “Grace Hartigan: The Gift of Attention” at the Portland Museum of Art, Oregon
October 10, 2025–January 11, 2026
Grace Hartigan, (1968) Grace Hartigan Estate © Grace Hartigan Estate Photo: Courtesy of the Estate of Grace Hartigan/ACA Galleries, New York
During the 1950s, Grace Hartigan was an artistic sensation who mingled with poets and writers, including Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Daisy Aldan, and James Merrill. Hartigan was critically acclaimed for her works that freely danced between abstraction and figuration. This major exhibition, which was organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art, brings together 40 of her works created between 1952 and 1968, which show her at the pinnacle of her powers, and the deep influence of poetry on her art-making, particularly her deep and at times fraught friendship with O’Hara.
7. “Ruth Asawa” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
October 19, 2025–February 7, 2026
Ruth Asawa at Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective View, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1973. Photograph by Laurence Cuneo. © 2024 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner.
California artist and educator Ruth Asawa devoted her over six-decade-long career to abstract explorations of form. Having studied at Black Mountain College, she developed a practice committed to making art every single day. Asawa is most celebrated for her undulating looped-wire sculptures that mirror organic shapes. “Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective,” co-organized by SFMoMA and MoMA, is now making its long-anticipated East Coast debut. The sweeping exhibition brings together over 300 artworks. And while her famed wire sculptures are here in all their graceful glory, so are lesser-known works in bronze casts, drawings, paintings, and prints that offer new dimensions to Asawa’s practice.
8. “Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
October 24, 2025–July 12, 2026
Grandma Moses, We Are Resting, 1951 2019.55, © Grandma Moses Properties Co., NY.
The artist Anna Mary Robertson Moses, or Grandma Moses (1860–1961), didn’t start painting in earnest until her late 70s. Then, in 1940, at the age of 80, she was given her first gallery exhibition by the dealer Otto Kallir. She became an overnight popular sensation whose fame outstripped many other women artists of her time. Her folkloric paintings—often of rural landscapes—combined direct observation of nature with memories in idiosyncratic, distinctly American visions. Thirty-three artworks from the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s own collection, including many of her most beloved paintings, make up the core of this exhibition.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
