National Museum of Women in the Arts

The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, on the corner of New York Avenue and 13^th Street, is dedicated to female artists. It contains over 4500 works by artists, such as Frida Kahlo and Alma Thomas, as well as exhibits by specific artists. Currently, the exhibits include Awake in the Dream World: The Art of Audrey Niffenegger (to November 10, 2013) and Wanderer: Travel Prints by Ellen Day Hale (to January 5, 2014).

The general section includes paintings by Rosa Bonheur, Frida Kahlo, and Robin Kahn.

Rosa Bonheur was born in Bordeaux, France, in 1822, and died in Fontainebleau in 1899. Her piece, The Highland Raid (1860) is oil on canvas. She received her painting training from her father who was a landscape artist. He encouraged her interest in arts and animals. Bonheur’s reputation developed as a realist animal painter and sculptor in the 1840s, and regularly exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1841 to 1853.

The museum includes Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky (1937) by well-known Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). The oil on masonite was painted while Trotsky lived with her and her artist husband, Diego Rivera, for two years. Joseph Stalin expelled the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky from the USSR in 1929. In January 1937 Trotsky and his wife received asylum in Mexico, and lived with Kahlo.

American artist Robin Kahn (1961--) exhibits Victoria’s Secret (1995), a mixed media piece on canvas. Kahn recontextualizes material from historic journals, home economic guides, and textbooks. The woman with the mask is an image from a series of 17^th century prints representing the Four Seasons. She has layered the image with vellum to “amplify the sense of mystery.”

http://nmwa.org/

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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