Walking into the first room of Making Their Mark feels less like entering a chronological survey and more like stepping into a tightly staged presentation—the kind of focused visual exchange you associate with an art fair, except here the argument is historical.
Pictured above: Installation view of Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.; February 27 to July 26, 2026; Photo by Kevin Allen Photography for NMWA. 2026/02 .Photographer: Kevin Allen. Pictured above Joan Mitchell, Untitled (1992).
The first painting you encounter is Joan Mitchell’s Untitled (1992), measuring 110 1/4 by 142 inches. Painted in France near the end of her life, the diptych is split into two panels that read as separate yet continuous fields. Brilliant yellows dominate, punctuated by green and reddish stems recalling the flowers she cultivated in her garden in Vétheuil. Mitchell was dying of lung cancer at the time; the divided canvas is difficult to ignore in that context. Yet the painting does not read as elegiac. It reads as forceful and fully present. You register scale first, then structure, then chromatic insistence.
Pictured above: Janet Sobel, Untitled, ca. 1946; Matte paint, enamel paint, and sand on wood panel, 21 3/4 x 15 1/4 x 1/4 in.; Shah Garg Collection; Courtesy Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York. Photographer: Pratik Parulekar
Across the room there’s an abstract painting with shades of red, green, orange and blue overlaid with thick black paintstrokes and drips. The earliest work in the exhibition, this is Janet Sobel’s Untitled (1946), an enamel-and-sand painting with a dense, granular surface. The pairing is deliberate. Innovation did not begin where textbooks often place it. Sobel is not framed as a precursor footnote; she is positioned as foundational.
Pictured above: Installation view of Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; February 27 to July 26, 2026; Photo by Kevin Allen Photography for NMWA. 2026/02. Photographer: Kevin Allen. Pictured above Mary Weatherford’s The Tempest (left) and Aria Dean Little Island/Gut Punch (right).
Nearby, Mary Weatherford’s The Tempest (2015) stretches across the wall, bright blue punctuated with measured touches of red. A vertical neon tube bisects the surface, shifting the painting into objecthood. Gesture is no longer only brushstroke, it is electrical. On the floor, Aria Dean’s Little Island/Gut Punch (2022) interrupts the wall-bound exchange, grounding the room physically and complicating the optical intensity of the surrounding canvases.
The relational thesis intended here is established through adjacency: abstraction is not one linear story but a set of parallel experiments.
Pictured above: Samia Halaby, Bird Dog (1987), Circles (1987) and Fly over Jersey (1987). Kinetic paintings programmed on a Commodore Amiga computer with sound. Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection. Photo by Phil Hutinet for East City Art.
One of the exhibition’s revelations is Samia Halaby. Although she is best known as an abstract painter, Halaby was experimenting with computer-generated abstraction in 1986, teaching herself BASIC and C programming on a Commodore Amiga 1000 to create what she called “kinetic paintings.” The three works on view—Bird Dog, Circles and Fly over Jersey—are animated compositions of color, movement and sound that still feel fresh today. They aren’t a detour from painting so much as an extension of it, reflecting Halaby’s conviction that abstraction should speak in the visual language of its own time.
Pictured above: Howardena Pindell, Untitled #7 (Carnival, Bahia, Brazil), 2022; Mixed media on canvas, 86 x 86 in.; Shah Garg Collection; © Howardena Pindell; Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York; Photo by Charles Benton.
Howardena Pindell’s Untitled #7 (Carnival, Bahia, Brazil) dominates one wall. What initially reads as optical vibration, upon closer inspection, is revealed to be the accumulation of punched paper and pigment. The surface is built methodically. Labor is visible. The discipline behind the abstraction becomes part of the argument.
Textiles and unconventional supports appear repeatedly. Fabric fields catch and diffuse light, blurring the boundary between painting and object. The exhibition consistently invites viewers to reconsider where painting ends and construction begins.
The final galleries shift toward figuration without abandoning abstraction.
Pictured above: Installation view of Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; February 27 to July 26, 2026; Photo by Kevin Allen Photography for NMWA. 2026/02. Photographer: Kevin Allen. Works referenced below, seen in this photograph are Joan Semmel’s Horizons (middle of back wall), Maria Lassnig Die grüne Malerin (right on back wall), Simone Fattal’s Young Warrior (The Trophy) (in the corner between walls).
Maria Lassnig’s late work, including Die grüne Malerin (The Green (female) Painter) (2000), embodies her “body awareness” approach where psychological states rendered through distortion rather than idealization. The body is not performed; it is felt.
Nearby stands Simone Fattal’s Young Warrior (The Trophy) (2023), a bronze figure that reads as monument and refusal simultaneously. Its matte surface absorbs light, anchoring the room after so much chromatic force.
Perhaps the most formally ambitious figurative work in the exhibition is Joan Semmel’s Horizons (1981). A seated nude appears in two registers at once: naturalistic and abstracted. The chromatic echo that overlays the body reads as expanded perception — a doubled consciousness. In this work, Semmel stages a dialogue between figuration and abstraction rather than choosing between them. It could command an entire wall; its internal argument warrants that space.
In the adjacent gallery, generational dialogue becomes explicit.
Pictured above: Elizabeth Murray Joanne and the Canyon. Photo by Phil Hutinet for East City Art.
Elizabeth Murray’s Joanne and the Canyon (1990-1991) demands distance. Its shaped canvas and buoyant forms lock into spatial coherence only when viewed from across the room. Bright complementary oranges and blues activate one another without collapsing into decoration.
Pictured above: Kara Walker A Judgment on Paris. Photo by Phil Hutinet for East City Art.
Kara Walker’s A Judgment on Paris (2024) references Greek mythology rather than the French capital. Executed in watercolor and cut paper, it demonstrates Walker’s mastery of silhouette. The tension between positive and negative space carries narrative weight; paper becomes both stage and blade.
The exhibition closes with works that complicate abstraction’s relationship to identity.
Pictured above: Kay WalkingStick’s Red Painting/Red Person (left wall). Photo by Phil Hutinet for East City Art.
Kay WalkingStick’s Red Painting/Red Person (1976) layers red tonal fields with references to landscape and heritage, situating Indigenous cosmology within the language of abstraction rather than outside it.
Pictured above: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, In the Future Map, 2021; Acrylic, oil, and mixed media collage on canvas, 72 x 47 3/4 in.; Shah Garg Collection; © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith; Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York; Photo by Ian Reeves.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s The Futures Map (2021) overlays the geography of the United States with symbolic forms and declarative text: “… in the Future We Will All Be Mixed Bloods.” The work functions as both critique and projection, mapping identity as dynamic rather than fixed.
Making Their Mark doesn’t attempt to correct the history of abstraction—that argument has already been made. What it does instead is widen it, demonstrating how many parallel systems of mark-making—gestural, algorithmic, textile, sculptural, political, bodily—have been operating simultaneously. The first room establishes that through adjacency, and the rest of the exhibition follows through, moving between painting and sculpture, analog and digital, body and system without forcing a single narrative. It doesn’t need to overstate its case. The work makes the argument—and that widening feels overdue.
Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection is on view at National Museum of Women in the Arts from
February 27 – July 26, 2026. More information, including hours and ticketing, available on the museums’ site HERE.
