National Museum of Women in the Arts

The National Museum of Women in the Arts is the only art museum in the United States that is dedicated to the work of women artists. Wilhelmina Cole Holladay founded the museum in 1981 after her good friend Nancy Hanks, the first female chair of the National Endowment of the Arts, jokingly suggested that Holladay and her spouse, Wallace F. Holladay, start a museum with their collection of approximately 500 works by women artists that they had acquired over a 20-year period. Today the collection includes more than 3,000 works by more than 800 women artists, dating from the 16th century to the present, and represents a broad range of media, styles, and nationalities. For example, the collection includes works by 16th-century Italian painter Lavinia ...