UK Friends of the National Museum of Women in the Arts

03/04/2026

Happy birthday to Maria Sybille Merian! You can see works on loan from NMWA in the exhibition “Unforgettable: Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam 1650-1750” in Ghent, a collaboration between NMWA and MSK Ghent.

27/03/2026

According to the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2026, only 11% of artists in the top 200 across all fine art auction sectors were women, and sales of their works accounted for just 8% of total values.

“Overall, in line with findings in previous years, although some female artists commanded very high prices at auction and had robust markets, they were a relative minority compared with male artists. In addition, even within the female segment, value, liquidity, and commercial success were concentrated in a small group of female stars, rather than being widely distributed across the market.”

💌 This Women's History Month, help us continue our fight towards gender equity in the arts by donating today! Give by March 31 and we’ll display your name on our 2026 Honor Roll, as a visible statement that you stand with women artists: https://secure.nmwa.org/donate/q/honor?premove=Y&promo=S263Social&utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=or-S263

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27/03/2026

A must-see in London! You can also see work by Michaelina Wautier in the groundbreaking exhibition “Unforgettable: Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1650-1750” currently showing at MSK Ghent, a collaboration with the National Museum of Women in the Arts which had a beautiful and highly-acclaimed run at NMWA in Washington.

Michaelina Wautier was an established and talented woman artist, a rarity in the 17th century— so why was her trailblazing work and legacy almost entirely forgotten?

Here are 5 things you need to know about this ‘new’ Old Master 👇

03/03/2026

Take action during Women’s History Month with a Random Act of Art Equity!

28/02/2026

Congratulations to Rose Wylie on her largest exhibition to date! And a huge shout-out to the National Museum of Women in the Arts and their "Women to Watch" program which helped get her back on the radar in 2010!

"Today, Wylie is one of the great personalities of the art world, but until she was 76, she was barely known. Her long stretche of invisibility began with motherhood and persisted until Wylie's inclusion in a "Women to Watch" exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, which, in tandem with a hagiographic profile by Germaine Greer, brought her a rush of attention.

The 91-year-old artist’s zingy paintings have the power to stop you in your tracks

09/02/2026

Meet the artists in “Women to Watch UK: A Book Arts Revolution” at Christie’s London (February 10-12). RACHEL SMITH is an artist who works across art and writing to produce visual poetry and artist-books. Her work ‘flies through’ existing texts, jumbling orders of expected structures, using association, error, and distraction to explore how sense might be sought, rejected, and re-fused. She embraces a meandering lostness, creating space for the as-yet-unthought, and materialising bodily responses to language as a neuro-queer practitioner. Smith gained her PhD in 2020 from Sheffield Hallam University. She co-edits Intergraphia books, an artist publishing project with Emma Bolland. Her work is held in public collections at Tate Library Special Collections, University College London Special Collection, and The Henry Moore Institute Research Library

07/02/2026

Meet the artists in “Women to Watch UK: A Book Arts Revolution” at Christie’s London (February 10-12). BATOOL SHOWGHI is a multidisciplinary artist. Showghi’s approach to the artist’s book and her mixed-media textile work is concerned with the experience of women and the way in which this experience relates to cultural and religious boundaries. She reflects on themes of turbulence, immigration, disintegration of the family and the experience of displacement. Batool Showghi, born in Iran, holds an MA in Design & Media Arts from the University of Westminster, and a BA (Hons) Fine Art: Printmaking and Photography from London Guildhall University. Her work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally. Her artist’s books are held in public collections, including the British Library and the Tate Library Special Collections.

27/01/2026

Meet the artists in "Women to Watch UK: A Book Arts Revolution" at Christie's London (February 10-12): FRANCISCA PRIETO is an artist interested in the traces of humanity embedded within the disregarded. Her conceptual work explores and combines fragments of history with the architectural principles of space, line, and structure. Prieto’s visual language is the result of considered methodologies where she documents and constructs new layers of meaning to reflect on historical narratives and art theory. Drawing from her own collection of timeworn publications and objects, she seeks to capture their essence, intertwining these fragments charged with humanity and history with intricate metalwork. Francisca Prieto, born in Chile, holds an MA Communication Design from Central Saint Martins (2001). Her work is exhibited in the UK and internationally and held in public collections, including Tate Library Special Collections, the British Library, and the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

26/01/2026

https://www.ukfriendsofnmwa.org/shop/opening-women-to-watch-book-art/ Meet the artists in "Women to Watch UK: A Book Arts Revolution" at Christie's London (vernissage February 10). LARISSA NOWICKI is a visual artist employing critical making across art, design, craft, and research, to challenge old paradigms within art history. From old books she materializes new artworks that recombine history, gendered labour, and artistic language into contemporary narratives that foreground the handmade. Larissa Nowicki holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MA in Communication Art and Design from the Royal College of Art, where she is currently a practice-led PhD candidate. Her work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally, including Man & Eve Projects (London, UK). She has been awarded multiple residencies at the Albers Foundation and her work is held in the Albers Foundation Archive in Bethany, Connecticut. She is represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco, California.

26/01/2026

Meet the artists in "Women to Watch UK: A Book Arts Revolution" at Christie's London (vernissage February 10). TAMSIN GREEN is an artist whose multidisciplinary practice combines walking, writing, photography and publishing. Working with the structure and materiality of the artists’ book, she explores the ecological relationships between humans and more-than-humans. These works investigate how we come to know the land, how we interpret and represent it, whose paths we trace, and which legacies we carry. She is the founder of manual.editions and the Sustainable Photobook Publishing (SPP) network, and is currently a PhD practice-based researcher at CREAM, University of Westminster. Her work is held in public collections, including The Bodleian Library at Oxford University and National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

24/11/2025

A great reason to head to Margate! Until May 4, 2026.

The artist’s complete control of colour and space ensnares and mesmerises, leaving you lost in a reverie of wonder and surprise. You just can’t look away

24/11/2025

Frida Kahlo self-portrait sets a new auction record for a work by a woman at $54.7 million. The previous record was held by Georgia O’Keeffe at $44.4 million.

Sotheby’s closed the week of marquee autumn evening sales in New York with three back-to-back, sold-out auctions on Thursday (20 November), bringing in a grand total of $252.9m ($304.5m with fees). That sits around the middle of the firm’s estimated take for the night of between $211.3m and $289.3m (all estimates calculated without fees).

The night started with a sale of 13 lots from the estate of the late Chicagoan collectors Cindy and Jay Pritzker that surpassed Sotheby’s high estimate of $88.5.m to bring in $91.7m ($109.5m with fees). A stellar group of 24 works by Surrealist heavy-hitters from an unnamed collection (marketed as “Exquisite Corpus”) followed, generating $81.9m ($98m with fees), squarely within the group’s estimate range ($66.7m-$98.9m). The night concluded with a multiple-owner sale of Modern art that, following three withdrawals, took in $78.9m ($96.9m with fees) across 29 lots, well within the house’s pre-sale estimate of $71.1m to $101.9m.

“People responded really well to the single-owner collections, both the Pritzkers and Exquisite Corpus, but also the collections within the multiple-owner sale, from the [Matthew and Carolyn] Bucksbaum collection, Geri Brawerman’s collection and others,” Helena Newman, Sotheby’s chairman of Europe and worldwide chairman of Impressionist and Modern art—who commanded the rostrum for the third of the night’s sales—said afterwards. “The focus on Surrealism tonight was really reflective of the surge in interest in the movement in the last several years, which was fed by recent museum exhibitions marking the movement’s centennial last year.”

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/11/21/frida-kahlo-record-van-gogh-still-life-sothebys-auction-new-york