Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Setting Sail: The Story of Sea Cloud
Feb. 15 to June 15
Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens
Using documents, photographs, models, paintings and decorative art objects, “Setting Sail” tells the story of Sea Cloud, commissioned in 1930 by General Foods heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and her husband, E. F. Hutton. Christened Hussar V, the four-masted, German-built windjammer was elaborately outfitted by Post. In 1942, she and her third husband, Joseph Davies, former ambassador to the U.S.S.R., lent the renamed yacht to the Coast Guard for weather ship service. Its racially integrated crew included painter Jacob Lawrence, whose work as a Coast Guard artist is featured. Restored after the war, the ship was sold in 1955 to Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. After other ownership changes, Sea Cloud was redesigned for 64 passengers and continues to operate as a luxury cruise ship.
Timeless Mucha: The Magic of Line
Feb. 22 to May 18
The Phillips Collection
“JOB,” 1896. Alphonse Mucha. Courtesy The Phillips Collection.
Displaying over 100 works from the Mucha Trust Collection, “Timeless Mucha”?surveys the work of Art Nouveau painter and decorative artist Alphonse Mucha. Born in 1860 in Moravia — then part of the Austrian Empire and now in Czechia — Mucha (pronounced MOOKH-ha) made revolutionary contributions to graphic design, transforming poster art, commercial illustration and visual aesthetics with his intricate linework, flowing forms and highly stylized designs, notably for French actress Sarah Bernhardt. A Slav nationalist, Mucha was arrested and interrogated by the Nazis after the occupation of Czechoslovakia and died in Prague in 1939. His distinctive style was revived in the 1960s, becoming a hallmark of psychedelic rock posters, album covers, comic books and Japanese?manga.
Intrinsic Beauty: Celebrating the Art of Textiles
Feb. 22 to June 14
The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum
“Intrinsic Beauty” brings together a range of masterworks from the Textile Museum’s collection to launch the centennial year of the museum, founded in 1925 by collector and connoisseur George Hewitt Myers in his Kalorama residence and the adjacent mansion (both now owned by Jeff Bezos). The exhibition, in the facility the museum shares with the George Washington University Museum on the GW campus, celebrates textile making as an ancient and sophisticated art form. Examples of textiles on view: a tunic from Peru made in 950 or earlier, a 13th-century hanging from Japan, a fragment from a 14th– or 15th-century curtain from Spain, a fragment from a 16th– or 17th-century cover from Türkiye, a 17th-century man’s robe from India and a 19th-century shoulder cloth from Indonesia.
Uncanny
Feb. 28 to Aug. 10
National Museum of Women in the Arts
In historical representations, women’s bodies — viewed through a male gaze — were often associated with strangeness and horror or positioned as passive or enigmatic objects. Featuring paintings, sculptures, photographs, works on paper and video art by more than 30 artists — including Louise Bourgeois, Leonora Carrington, Ann Hamilton, Mary Ellen Mark, Meret Oppenheim, Shahzia Sikander, Remedios Varo and Gillian Wearing — this exhibition explores how the concept of the uncanny, first popularized by Sigmund Freud in 1919, is used by women artists to regain agency and probe feelings of revulsion, fear and discomfort. “Uncanny” centers on recent acquisitions and rarely seen works from the collection, supplemented with key loans.
Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist
March 9 to July 6
National Gallery of Art
After descending from its Brooklyn Museum suspension, “Floating Family” will travel to the National Gallery of Art with the rest of the Elizabeth Catlett retrospective. Photo by Richard Selden.
Born in 1915 in Washington, D.C., Elizabeth Catlett attended Howard University, became the University of Iowa’s first-ever MFA recipient and studied ceramics and lithography in Chicago. In 1946, after several years in New York, she went to Mexico City to pursue printmaking at the Taller de Gráfica Popular, where she continued to work for two decades, barred from the U.S. for alleged Communist sympathies. On view in this major retrospective, organized by the National Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum, are more than 150 examples of her work, including prints from her “Sharecropper”?and?“Black Woman”?series, the large 1970 linocut “Watts/Detroit/Washington/Harlem/Newark” and the wood sculpture “Floating Family”?of 1996. Catlett died in Cuernavaca in 2012 at age 96.
Delighting Krishna: Paintings of the Child-God
March 15 to Aug. 24
National Museum of Asian Art
“Delighting Krishna: Paintings of the Child-God” will be at the National Museum of Asian Art from March 15 to Aug. 24. Courtesy NMAA.
In “Delighting Krishna,” the National Museum of Asian Art will put a group of 14?monumental paintings on cotton cloth of the child-god Krishna on public view for the first time since the 1970s. Known as pichwais, the works, averaging about eight by eight feet, are used by the Hindu Pushtimarg community to engage with the divine. Serving as backdrops for three-dimensional displays, they are typically paired with icons of Krishna, music and scents. The NMAA?pichwais — most painted in Nathdwara, Rajasthan, India, the global epicenter of the Pushtimarg community — date from the 18th to the 20th century. The exhibition will also feature Pushtimarg court paintings and multimedia works, with additional context provided by Hindu community members, curators and conservators.
Also of note …
Installations by Alex Da Corte and Jenny Holzer
Glenstone
Opening March 20
On nearly 300 acres in Potomac, Maryland, Glenstone Museum will reopen its Pavilions with Alex Da Corte’s “Rubber Pencil Devil (Hell House),” Jenny Holzer’s “The Child Room” and works by Simone Leigh, Charles Ray and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.
Hung Liu: Happy and Gay; & Loving
Georgetown University Art Galleries
Through April 13; through May 18
On view in the Maria and Alberto de la Cruz Gallery: Hung Liu’s paintings based on cartoons (xiaorenshu) of her youth; in the Lucille M. & Richard F.X. Spagnuolo Art Gallery: photographs from GU’s collection, curated by a student team.