Community

The Committee creates, supports, and actively participates in programs to advance women in the arts and arts education.

Women to Watch

A biennial exhibition program developed specifically for the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ national and international outreach committees, designed to increase the visibility of, and critical response to, promising women artists who are deserving of national and international attention.

An outstanding Massachusetts curator, approved by NMWA, nominates a short list of artists working within the chosen medium. NMWA’s curator selects a single artist from these nominees for the Women to Watch exhibition in Washington.

The Massachusetts Committee was represented by artist Daniela Rivera and nominating curator Lisa Tung at the April 2024 opening of the New Worlds exhibit in Washington, DC.

Learn more about Women to Watch

Community Profile

Kate Gilbert
Founding Executive Director, Boston Public Art Triennial
Member, MA-NMWA Advisory Council

"Bold. Open. Sharp." These are the values of the Boston Public Art Triennial, and surely the adjectives also aptly describe the Triennial's Founding Executive Director, Kate Gilbert. Captivated at an early age by her first exposure to pubic art--the James Wines/SITE "Ghost Parking Lot," which presented automobiles covered in asphalt in a Hamden, CT parking lot--Kate pursued studio art as a way, she says, of "understanding my world." She earned an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, now part of Tufts University.

Kate’s path includes several years in which she worked at design and place-making nonprofits (“they fed my addiction to painting”) before entering graduate school. Upon completion of her degree, she pursued video, sculpture and a curatorial consulting service for public art initiatives, Kate Gilbert Studio. She then founded the nonprofit organization Now + There, in 2015. But, as Kate tells the story, there is much more to this evolution. A family legacy of advocacy and commitment to sustainability led Kate to contemplate how to bring Boston’s diverse communities together to consider bold new ways of making and consuming art. “Everything has changed with technology,” she explains. “We are not collecting stuff to make art anymore.”

Over several exploratory years Now + There morphed and eventually became the Boston Public Art Triennial, the city’s first and only public art organization dedicated to supporting artists and communities in bold, contemporary public art. In partnership with the City of Boston, the Triennial will present its first edition, titled “The Exchange,” from May 22 until October 31, 2025. Fifteen new outdoor public art commissions showcasing local, national and internationally known artists, curated by Artistic Director Pedro Alonzo and Curator Tess Lukey, will reflect sub-themes of equity, climate and biodiversity, indigeneity, shared humanity, and addiction and wellness. In addition to the curated projects there will be three open-call projects on view and five in collaboration with local museums. More than 100 events across the city are planned.

Notwithstanding the high value Bostonians place on the city’s history, the Triennial team has not found much resistance to its proposals and plans for iterative public art. “There are many, many people who want to go beyond ‘male and stale’,” she says, referring to Boston’s many iconic monuments to political and military leaders. [Gaining cooperation was] more of an educational acculturation process.” She is quick to describe the layers of process and benefit from engaging communities and the Triennial’s paid community captains. But Kate is clear: “The artists come first, then community and where to put the work.” She emphasizes that the selection criteria require appropriate, responsive spaces where participation can be measurable.

And given the democratic nature of public art and its potential appeal to artists eager to gain an audience for their work, Kate offers this advice: “Be lockstep in driving toward what you want. Understand what you want someone to see and think about, then extrapolate to where and in what form.”

With heartfelt thanks to Kate and the Triennial team, we look forward to the promise of the first Boston Public Art Triennial—the creation of a public art tradition, a new art history for Boston that is Bold. Open. Sharp.

Photo: Sylvia Stagg-Giuliano

Read more Community Profiles

Education Outreach

Older Adults

Having participated in an arts course focused on the history and techniques of the Boston School (of painting), a group of students led by an MA-NMWA Committee member spent their final class at the Boston Athenaeum enjoying a tour of relevant artworks and the beautiful building itself. MA-NMWA thanks the Athenaeum and is grateful for the partnership with the Creative Aging Programs of Goddard House Community Initiatives. We look forward to enriching future arts courses with similar excursions to Boston's great arts institutions.

K-12 Students

MA-NMWA partners with Artward Bound, the nation's first four-year, arts-centric college prep program, to offer high school students unique programs inspired by local events.

In late 2022 MA-NMWA hosted the students at an interactive workshop, led by an MA-NMWA Committee member, on Surrealist concept and techniques inspired by the “New Worlds: Women to Watch 24" theme. Students then enjoyed a private visit to the Massachusetts exhibition, where the artists were present to discuss their work and answer questions. We hope to continue this tradition with the upcoming 2027 Women to Watch.

This program was made possible with support from Boston Cultural Council and Reopen Creative Boston grants.

Partnerships and Collaborations

The Massachusetts Committee has sought out alliances with other cultural entities that work with us to support and promote the work of women artists. The list below includes many of these alliances.

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery*
Addison Gallery of American Art*
Krakow Witkin Gallery*
City of Boston Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture
Boston Ballet*
Boston College McMullen Museum of Art*
Boston Cultural Council
Boston Public Art Triennial (formerly Now + There)
Boston Society for Architecture, Women in Design*
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Cape Ann Museum*
Cape Cod Museum of Art*
Childs Gallery*
Concord Museum*
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Art Collection*
Danforth Art Museum*
Davis Museum at Wellesley College*
deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum*
DeDee Shattuck Gallery*
Fitchburg Art Museum*
Friends of the Public Garden*
Fruitlands Museum*
Fuller Craft Museum*
Gallery Kayafas*
Griffin Museum of Photography
Harvard Art Museums*
Harvard Business School
Huntington Theatre Company*
ICA Watershed*
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston*
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum*
Mass Cultural Council
MassArt Art Museum*
MIT Media Lab*
MIT Museum*
Montserrat College of Art*
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston*
National Heritage Museum*
New Bedford Art Museum*
New England Watercolor Society*
Nichols House Museum*
North Bennet Street School*
Northeastern University*
Orchard House*
Peabody Essex Museum*
Praise Shadows Art Gallery*
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University*
Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy*
Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute*
School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University*
Trustman Art Gallery, Simmons University*
Skinner, Inc.*
Smith College Art Museum*
Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities*
Society of Arts + Crafts Boston*
Tufts University Art Gallery*
Vose Galleries*
Worcester Museum of Art*

*Indicates a venue where MA-NMWA has held events

Of Special Interest

Massachusetts

Boston Public Art Triennial
May 22 -- Oct 31, 2025
Multiple City of Boston neighborhood locations

Themed The Exchange, the 2025 Triennial is an artist-driven and expert-supported exhibition of extraordinary cross-disciplinary public art projects that break down social and professional barriers to promote collaboration and strengthen community resilience.

Read the April 24 Boston Globe article and the MA-NMWA Community Profile of Founding Executive Director Kate Gilbert (see left)
Plan your visit at the Triennial website

PLATFORM 33: Zohra Opoku, Self-Portraits
Through Sept 30, 2025
deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA

Self-portraits shown on a large-scale billboard and five smaller signs throughout deCordova’s Sculpture Park, immersed and protected within deCordova’s varied environment of native and non-native plants.

The Visionary Work of Minne Evans
May 10 -- Oct 26, 2025
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

Sixteen multimedia works by Evans—all on loan from the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, SC—contextualized with handwritten letters, postcards, and other ephemera to illuminate the artist’s complex and profoundly spiritual relationship to nature in her hometown.

Beverly Semmes: Boulders / Flag / Flip / Kick
Jul 29 – Nov 23, 2025
Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford, MA

The most comprehensive survey of Semmes’ work to date: beginning in her student days at Tufts, where she tested ideas of ephemerality, scale, and representation in the itinerate installation Boulders, to her most recent fabric installations, ceramics, and paintings that continue to explore issues of female visibility and presence.

GENERATIONS: L'Merchie Frazier, Daniela Rivera, and Wen-ti Tsen
May 22 -- Nov 30, 2025
MassArt Art Museum, Boston, MA

Inaugural recipients of the Wagner Arts Fellowship exploring themes of community memory, identity, and cultural narratives through their distinct artistic practices in sculpture, painting, textile, and public art. Note: Daniela Rivera was a member of the 2024 Women to Watch cohort, selected to represent Massachusetts by NMWA.

Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer
Aug 23 -- Dec 7, 2025
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

The first comprehensive solo exhibition dedicated to the artist brings together 35 of her finest paintings from museums and private lenders alongside plant and insect specimens and work by other female artists, including Anna Ruysch, Maria Sibylla Merian, and Alida Withoos. Seeing these provocative juxtapositions, visitors can gain insight into the central role women played in the production of scientific knowledge in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Danielle Mckinney: Tell Me More
Aug 20, 2025 -- Jan 4, 2026
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

Mckinney's American museum debut celebrates the artist's introspective explorations of Black womanhood, illuminating resilience, beauty, and autonomy. The exhibition brings together a series of paintings that blend art historical motifs with contemporary sensibilities, creating unforgettable images that are both timeless and radical.

Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist
Aug 29, 2025 -- Jan 4, 2026
Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA

This exhibition surveys Lazzell's full career, exploring the pioneering artist’s lifelong pursuit of translating Modernism into an American art form and celebrating her largely unsung achievements in championing abstraction in the United States through painting and printmaking.

Edna Andrade: Imagination is Never Static
Aug 30, 2025 -- Jan 4, 2026
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA

A new look at the artist-educator's practice, this exhibition emphasizes the central role of drawing as well as interdisciplinary exploration in her art and in modernist movements of the 20th century.

B. Lynch: Little Dramas
Sept 13, 2025 -- Jan 11, 2026
Danforth Art Museum at Framingham State University, Framingham, MA

B. Lynch's figures are darkly humorous, and slightly disarming, as using puppets to tell a story creates detachment in the viewer. Not intended to look realistic, the puppets are playful and often a bit ridiculous; consequently, they ease the delivery
of a difficult yet urgent contemporary message.

Nayana LaFond: Portraits in Red
Sept 13, 2025 -- Jan 11, 2026
Danforth Art Museum at Framingham State University, Framingham, MA

Powerful portraits make visible the epidemic of murdered and missing Indigenous women.

Sonya Tanae Fort: I See You
Sept 13, 2025 -- Jan 11, 2026
Danforth Art Museum at Framingham State University, Framingham, MA

Exhibition includes images of the artist's home and family in Massachusetts, and her deep connections to Cape Verde. Place, family, and self-identity are integral to her work, and through her process she creates a space that unites themes of love, belonging, community, memory, and self-awareness.

Tara Sellios: Ask Now the Beasts
Jan 18, 2025 -- Jan 18, 2026
Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, MA

Monumental photographs depicting still life vignettes from organic materials (e.g., animal bones, insect specimens, and dried flowers) that consider the cyclical nature of Earth, intertwining symbols of death and references to life with the beauty of decay.

Rituals for Remembering: María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Ana Mendieta
Apr 12, 2025 – Feb 15, 2026
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

Though the two never met, the two artists' practices share a reckoning with displacement and exile from their homes in Cuba, a deep reverence for the land, and a transformative use of natural elements like water, earth, and fire. For both, memory, ritual, and spirituality animate their artworks across photography, film, video, drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance.

New England

Sofía Gallisá Muriente / MATRIX 197
Sept 5, 2025 – Feb1, 2026
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT

Debuts a video about Puerto Rican nationalist Víctor Gerena, who pulled off the $7 million Águila Blanca (White Eagle) heist at a West Hartford Wells Fargo branch in 1983, and his mother, Gloria, a social worker and leader in Hartford’s Puerto Rican community. Blending the reimagined narratives with real surveillance film shot by police during the persecution of the Puerto Rican independence movement, Gallisá’s exhibition contends with the possibilities and limits of documentary forms.

At NMWA

Guerilla Girls: Making Trouble
Apr 12 -- Sept 28, 2025

Drawn from NMWA’s extensive holdings of work by the Guerrilla Girls, this exhibition presents an enthralling visual timeline of the group’s progress and ever-expanding subject matter, including gender disparity in the arts as well as politics, the environment, and pop culture.

A Radical Alteration: Women’s Studio Workshop as a Sustainable Model for Art Making
Apr 25 -- Sept 28, 2025

Exhibition looks at Women's Studio Workshop's rich history as a proponent of book arts for marginalized communities in the US, through more than 40 objects dating from 1974 to 2024, including artists’ books created by more than 20 artists, as well as zines, ephemera and archival materials. Highlights the evolution of the organization as it successfully created the conditions under which art-making and institutional support serve a sustainable and more equitable art ecosystem.

View the full calendar of NMWA programs

Farther Afield

Joyce Wieland: Heart On
Until Jan 4, 2026
Art Gallery of Toronto (AGO), Toronto, Ont., Canada

Retrospective brings together more than five decades of artistic output to position the artist as a key figure in 20th century art and film. In addition to situating the artist's work in its artistic, social and political context, the exhibition highlights the many ways she anticipated current debates about feminism, social equity and ecology.

MA-NMWA is supported in part by funding from the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Cultural Sector Recovery Grant and the Boston Cultural Council's Reopen Creative Boston Fund, administered by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture.