Past Exhibitions

Learn about past exhibitions going back as far as 1941 when the National Gallery of Art first opened to the public.

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In the Library: The Evans-Tibbs Archive of African American Art
Closed April 12, 2019

In the Library: The Evans-Tibbs Archive of African American Art showcases the life and work of Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr., an accomplished art appraiser, broker, collector, and dealer, as well as the founder and director of his eponymous art gallery in Washington, DC.

Diverse Modernisms, 1935–1955
Closed July 30, 2019

In the years around World War II, modernist art produced in the United States was varied in style and subject matter. Despite many barriers to inclusion that persist to the present, art from this period was created by an increasingly diverse set of practitioners working in a range of media, as reflected by the works in this installation.

The image depicts geometric shapes and lines against a dark background. The composition includes vertical sections with various arrangements of shapes resembling an eye, tear droplets, and masks. The segments showcase circles, triangles, and ovals forming patterns resembling totemic symbols or mechanical parts. Bold brushstrokes and earthy tones enhance the mystique of the artwork, connecting the abstract forms with motifs like masks or tribal emblems.
No More Play
Closed February 18, 2019

This installation takes its title from Alberto Giacometti’s surrealist work, a sculpture-as-board-game made in the early 1930s. It is joined by two other objects that each allude to games and suggest hypothetical spaces for action to occur. Yet in all three works, the possibility for play is precluded.

Narrow boards of a wood gymnasium floor were taken apart and reassembled as vertical planks that make up this wide, rectangular panel, which hangs on a wall. Several boards have long strips of black tape and one, near the top right corner, has a band of red tape. Most of the markings are short checks of black, white, red, and green tape. The wood stain is dark in some areas, gray with damage in others, or flaking in places. The two longest horizontal black stripes are near the top left corner and across the right half, about a third of the way down from the top edge of the piece. The room where this hangs has wider planked wood floors and a white wall.
Gordon Parks: The New Tide, 1940-1950
Closed February 18, 2019

For the first time, the formative decade of Gordon Parks's 60-year career is the focus of an exhibition, which brings together 150 photographs and ephemera.

A young Black man stands in profile looking out a tall window to our right in this vertical black and white photograph. The image is cropped so his head, shoulder, and upper arm fill the left half of the composition. He has short hair and wears a shirt or jacket that diffuses the light to suggest that it could be flannel or another soft fabric. With a cigarette dangling loosely from his lips, he stares through the shattered upper pane of the window and he holds his right hand across his chest. The strong light source from the right accentuates his nose, cheeks, hair, and shoulder, and the space behind him is lost in shadow. A blurred, three-story building across the street has a dark façade with white stone lintels above the windows and a mansard roof with curved dormers.
The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in Renaissance Italy
Closed January 20, 2019
In the Library: Rachel Whiteread’s “Ghost”
Closed January 11, 2019
Rachel Whiteread
Closed January 13, 2019

This exhibition brings together some 100 objects from the course of the artist’s 30 year career, including drawings, photographs, architecture-scaled sculptures, archival materials, documentary materials on public projects, and several new works on view for the first time.

Set in a gallery against a row of windows, a free-standing, white plaster cube, nearly reaching the ceiling, angles back and away from us slightly to our right. The cube is made of blocks that fit together so the seams are visible. The side to our left is smooth. A short, tongue-like projection at the bottom center of the face to our right is surrounded by an inverted, squared off U arching over it. Though not obvious in this photograph, the artist created this work by filling an empty room with plaster. The tongue-like shape is the inside of a fireplace, and is lightly blackened where it lined the interior. The inset paneling in the cube would have been the room's mantlepiece, and inset bands along the floor and top of the cube would have been the baseboards and crown molding. The cube sits on a polished stone floor, and the ceiling of the room in which it sits is made of hollow triangular coffers. Opposite us, trees and a building are seen through the wall of windows behind the cube.
Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project
Closed April 22, 2019

Dawoud Bey's series, "The Birmingham Project," is a deeply felt and conceptually rich monument to the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963.

Corot: Women
Closed December 31, 2018

The forty-five paintings on display, created between the mid-1830s and the early 1870s, are largely divided into three major subjects: costumed single figures, nudes, and allegorical studio scenes.

Spaces: Works from the Collection, 1966–1976
Closed February 18, 2019

This installation features five significant minimal and post-minimal sculptures inspired by presentations of single-room artworks at the Dwan Gallery and the exhibition Spaces at the Museum of Modern Art.

Long prisms hang in rows within a nickel-gray room in this installation. The prisms come toward us in this view. A row of long prisms hang closely together to our right, and shorter prisms are hung in groups farther away from us. They cast long silvery-gray and black shadows on the ground, and hints of rainbows stripe the walls.
Sense of Humor
Closed February 3, 2019

The exhibition includes major works by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Jacques Callot, William Hogarth, James Gillray, Francisco de Goya, and Honoré Daumier, as well as later examples by Alexander Calder, Red Grooms, Saul Steinberg, Art Spiegelman, and the Guerrilla Girls.

This caricature shows a pink-skinned man with long, spindly arms, widely straddled legs, and a bulbous, potbellied torso blowing scraps of paper with puffed cheeks in this vertical, colored etching. He stands with his body facing us, hands planted near his hips, but he turns his narrow head to our right in profile as he blows out the slips of paper. Tall ass’s ears flank a red crown plastered with more scraps of paper. The papers on the crown and being blown out of the man’s pursed lips all read “one.” The man’s long, pointed nose and rotund cheeks are bright red, and lank, light brown hair brushes his neck. Eyebrows are arched over heavy-lidded eyes. His rounded belly is made up of yellow disks, possibly coins, that also reach up his long, thin neck. A cursive letter “L,” the symbol for a British pound, is written on the belly. A padlock hangs from a chain around his neck, bearing the words, “Power of securing Public Credit.” His long fingers hook around either side of his torso. A yellow skeleton key with a tag reading, “Key of Public Property” hangs from his left pinky finger, to our right. His arms are covered in blue sleeves with yellow buttons at the cuffs, and a scarlet-red cloak with yellow epaulets hangs over his arms and swirls around his shins. His feet are planted wide and he wears parchment-colored, knee-length britches, light blue stockings, and black shoes with buckles. He straddles a miniature view into a building labeled the “BANK OF ENGLAND,” where coins and slips of paper rain down from the ceiling. Tiny in scale, about two dozen men wearing dark hats and coats in brown, blue, red, or green look up and gesture toward the ceiling. At the center of the room is a domed structure about the height of the men. To our left of the main caricatured man and near his leg, five heads emerge from a bank of reedy grass. Each head has a red cap, and a white speech bubble angling from each mouth reads, “Midas has Ears.” Beyond the grass and heads, turquoise water leads back to a shoreline with a sign reading “BREST” and a flag striped horizontally with red, white, and blue. To our right, near the man’s waist, three miniature, light-skinned men with round faces and paunchy bellies float around a banner. Cloaks affixed around their necks flutter around their otherwise nude bodies, and they raise their hats high above their heads with one hand. The banner reads, “Prosperous state of British finances and the new plan for diminishing the national debt with hints on the increase of commerce.” The sky above these vignettes has a band of blue clouds. The paper being blown from the man’s mouth fills the upper right corner of the paper but in the upper left, touches of light blue beneath peach-colored dots suggest countless angels or bodies shooting into the sky. Under the border around the printed image, across the bottom, and inscription reads, “MIDAS, Transmuting all into GOLD PAPER,” and the word “GOLD” has been crossed out with overlapping, diagonal lines. The inscription continues below: “History of Midas, The great Midas having dedicated himself to Bacchus, obtained from that Deity, the power of changing all he Touched — Apollo fixed Asses Ears upon his head, for his Ignorance & although he tried to hide his disgrace with a Regal Cap, yet the very Sedges which grew from the Mud of the Pactolus, whispered out his Infamy, whenever they were agitated by the Wind from the opposite Shore __ Vide Ovids Metamorpho,” the last word fading out. In smaller letters, the work is inscribed “Js. Gy. inv & ft” under the lower left corner of the image, and “Pub. March 9th 1797 by H. Humphrey New Bond Street” under the lower right corner.
Water, Wind, and Waves: Marine Paintings from the Dutch Golden Age
Closed November 25, 2018

This exhibition explores the deep, multifaceted relationship the Dutch had with the water, including their gratitude for the sea’s bounty and their fear of its sometimes destructive power.

Beyond several craggy boulders that loom in the lower left corner of this horizontal painting, three sailing ships pitch wildly in crashing waves beneath towering clouds. At the center, a large ship tips sharply to our right with billowing ivory sails and two red, white, and blue striped flags whipping in the wind. White spray kicks up against the side of the boat and in the waves surrounding it. The sails of the second ship, to our right, are furled except for one that crashes down onto the deck. Tiny people scurry around inside the ship, which tilts steeply up on a high wave. The third ship floats beyond this, its sails also tied up. The top of a tall wooden mast along with a broken wooden pole poke up from emerald-green waves in the lower right corner, near a barrel and two bundles wrapped in cloth and tied with rope that bob nearby. One of the brown, jagged rocks to our left nearly spans the height of the painting while others jut from the water like crooked teeth. A bank of billowing, slate-gray clouds at the center of the sky separates a fog-gray sky and puffy clouds to our right from a patch of golden sunlight to our left, in the upper corner of the canvas. The artist signed and dated the work as if written on a rock at the bottom center of the canvas, “LBackh 1667.”

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