October 2026
October opens Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko at the Phillips, To Hear Her Speak at the Folger, and Beverly Pepper at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Nick Cave's new Soundsuit is at Glenstone all month, and Clifford Ross's digital waves leave the National Gallery rotunda on 18 October.
Permanent guide to October 2026 →
The Phillips Collection · Opens 24 October
Around 90 works trace the friendship Avery, Gottlieb and Rothko built over shared summers in Gloucester, from the 1920s to the mid-1960s. Many are shown publicly for the first time.
Folger Shakespeare Library · Opens 16 October
Some 100 photographs, playbills, diaries and costumes follow 450 years of Black women taking on Shakespeare, from Phillis Wheatley to Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. Curated by Patricia Akhimie.
National Museum of Women in the Arts · Opens 23 October
Gallery-scale sculptures, maquettes and a new film on Beverly Pepper, paired with her monumental outdoor pieces on New York Avenue, right outside the museum's door.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden · Opens 16 October
Six bodies of abstract photography Carlotta Corpron made in Texas from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, drawn from a recent gift of 48 prints.
Glenstone Museum · Free
Nick Cave's largest multi-figure Soundsuit yet: eleven forms joined by hand-sewn mother-of-pearl buttons, with headpieces shaped like gramophone horns. Book the free timed ticket in advance.
National Gallery of Art · Closes 18 October
A 23-foot screen under the West Building's Rotunda dome, where Clifford Ross builds breaking ocean waves out of millions of glowing pixels. These are its last weeks.
IA&A at Hillyer · Free
Katherine Steichen Rosing suspends dozens of 10-foot linen columns, inked and charred by candle flame, into a walk-through ghost forest, with video of woodland thickening with carbon.
IA&A at Hillyer · Free
Over two dozen artists and writers from six countries take on wildlife conservation through creatures of flight. Curated by Heather McMordie for the nonprofit Creature Conserve.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden · Free
Six bodies of work made in Texas between the late 1930s and early 1950s by the abstract photographer and teacher Carlotta Corpron, drawn from a recent gift of 48 prints plus loans.
Folger Shakespeare Library · Free
Curated by Patricia Akhimie, some 100 photographs, playbills, diaries and costumes trace 450 years of Black women engaging Shakespeare, from Phillis Wheatley to Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison.
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Gallery-scale sculptures, maquettes and a new film on Beverly Pepper (1922-2020), pairing with her outdoor installation along New York Avenue right outside the museum's door.
The Phillips Collection
Around 90 works from the 1920s to the mid-1960s tracing the friendship of Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, forged over shared summers in Gloucester. Many shown publicly for the first time.
National Gallery of Art · Free
A 23-foot screen under the West Building's Rotunda dome, where Clifford Ross builds breaking ocean waves out of millions of glowing pixels.
National Archives Museum · Free
Current Opening the Vault rotation: unseen US Coast Guard photographs from Ground Zero, plus objects from the moment President Bush learned of the attacks, including the "Don't Say Anything Yet" note.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden · Free
A century of upheaval across the second-floor outer ring: hundreds of works by Bacon, Dubuffet, Krasner, Lawrence, O'Keeffe and Pollock, rotated periodically and threaded with contemporary responses.
Smithsonian American Art Museum · Free
A ten-minute animation in which a British East India Company man dissolves into shifting Indo-Persian miniatures, scored by Pulitzer-winning composer Du Yun.
The Phillips Collection
Artwork by older adults living with memory loss, made through the museum's Creative Aging programme of gallery conversations followed by studio practice, with local senior centres and Reframing Care.
National Museum of Asian Art · Free
The Uzbek artist's first major US solo show: video works and photographs tracing Central Asia's landscapes, oral histories and Soviet-era ruins.
National Gallery of Art · Free
Over 30 works — Jasper Johns, Faith Ringgold, Gordon Parks, Childe Hassam, Dorothea Lange — on how the Stars and Stripes has served as pride, protest and raw material since the late 1800s.
American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center · Free
A major solo show filling the museum's second and third floors with the Korean artist's paintings, sculpture and multimedia, centred on his Taxidermy series on mortality.
National Gallery of Art · Free
Photographs, poems and film in which Ho-Chunk artist Sky Hopinka threads together family, language, place and lived Indigenous experience.
American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center · Free
Large-scale mixed-media paintings by the contemporary Islamic calligrapher, turning Qur'anic verses and divine names into layered surfaces of metallic leaf, texture and intricate script.
American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center · Free
Presented by the Alper Initiative for Washington Art: black-and-white street photographs Carr made after a forty-year legal career, building layered compositions out of reflections in DC and abroad.
American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center · Free
A Project Space show of two digital graphic narratives by AU's professor emerita of art history, played out on monitors: a travelling Miami palm tree, and the Odyssey retold around its women.
National Museum of American History · Free
The museum's semiquincentennial blockbuster: 250 objects across all three floors, from Jefferson's writing desk to the 1776 gunboat Philadelphia. Closes at the end of 2026 (exact date not yet announced).
National Gallery of Art · Free
Four paintings across six centuries — Titian, Cezanne and Rozeal. — hung together to show how artists answer the art history they inherit.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden · Free
Pendleton's first solo show in Washington, DC fills the second-floor inner ring with new and recent paintings plus a single-channel video, staged for the museum's circular galleries.
Smithsonian American Art Museum · Free
Nick Cave remakes the galleries as a dig site: crafted mammoth hides and bones, a video of the beasts come alive, and hundreds of found objects laid out like specimens.
Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens
The first exhibition devoted to Hillwood's textiles: 17th-century point de France lace, an 18th-century pearl-trimmed Russian liturgical panel, and new fibre work by Manca Ahlin and Sophia Narrett.
National Portrait Gallery · Free
An encore hang of 20 vintage prints by MGM's in-house glamour portraitist — Garbo, Harlow, Crawford, Gable and Dietrich, lit to look immortal.
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Over 80 quilts trace the Second Great Migration west, carried as warmth, ancestral memory and emblems of cultural survival by Black families settling in California.
National Museum of the American Indian · Free
The first major retrospective of Hoocąk sculptor Truman Lowe: nearly 50 works in willow, feathers and pigment that evoke the rivers, waterfalls and canoes of the Wisconsin woodlands.
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Marlo Pascual (1972-2020) enlarged, shattered and folded anonymous thrift-store photographs into uncanny Plexiglas sculptures that blur the line between picture and object.
Dumbarton Oaks Museum & Gardens · Free
A vivid portrait of Robert Woods Bliss as an early twentieth-century collector, drawn from the estate's own holdings. Special Exhibitions Gallery.
Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens
A long-term loan portrait of Lloyd Walton Patterson, who travelled to Soviet Russia in 1932 for the film Black and White and stayed, opening up the history of Black Americans in the USSR.
Smithsonian American Art Museum · Free
225 photographs from the NEA's Bicentennial-era survey projects, reuniting a 1970s portrait of America and setting it against federal survey photography going back to the 19th century.
National Portrait Gallery · Free
The museum turns its lens on its own building: the early Patent Office, told through portraits of Andrew Jackson, Samuel Morse and Lincoln, the only president to hold a patent.
Library of Congress · Free
Library collections trace how Americans have argued with, rallied around and reached for the Declaration of Independence — its ideals of equality, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden · Free
Ten room-swallowing installations trace immersive art from the late 1960s on — Flavin, Gilliam, Irwin, Pape and Long, then Chan, Eliasson, Finch, Johnson and Rottenberg. Five shown here for the first time.
National Archives Museum · Free
America250 show marking the Declaration's 250th anniversary, in three parts: the Revolution, the preservation of the original parchment, and how Americans have celebrated independence since 1776.
National Museum of Asian Art · Free
How Charles Lang Freer used his Detroit home as a proving ground for what became the first national art museum of the United States.
National Portrait Gallery · Free
New portraits of the 2025 award winners — Jamie Dimon, Temple Grandin, Joy Harjo and Steven Spielberg — including commissions by David Lenz and Kate Capshaw.
National Museum of American History · Free
The overlooked history of a trailblazing Filipino community in California, from the 1910s to the 1970s.
Anacostia Community Museum · Free
Ahead of the museum's 60th anniversary, this show asks how Washingtonians keep their own history - anchored by the diary of Adam Francis Plummer, with letters, photographs and hands-on archiving stations.
National Museum of Women in the Arts
The museum-wide collection installation, rejecting chronology for themes like Photo Credit, Seeing Red and Objectified across six continents and six centuries of women artists.
National Museum of the American Indian · Free
Original treaties on loan from the National Archives, wampum belts and peace medals tell the story of US–Native diplomacy from the colonial era to the present.
National Portrait Gallery · Free
Nine modern prints struck from Mathew Brady's original Civil War-era negatives — Lincoln, Hawthorne, Grant and Emma, Queen of Hawai'i — shown with a glass plate and Brady's wooden storage box.
National Museum of American History · Free
From the streets of Havana to the dance floors of New York and beyond, this bilingual show traces how salsa grew into a defining sound of the United States.
National Museum of Asian Art · Free
On the Freer plaza facing the National Mall, a monumental empty plinth held aloft by hundreds of small striding figures, questioning who monuments are for.
National Museum of Natural History · Free
America's national mammal, from 100,000 years of shaping the prairie to near-extinction and recovery. A six-foot bull bison, an ancient bison skull and a North American prairie soundscape.
National Museum of Natural History · Free
More than 600 specimens and cultural belongings from all 50 states, DC and five US territories — fossils, minerals and treasures chosen to represent every corner of the country.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum · Free
Original artifacts from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum come to Washington for the first time, free to the public. Announced for January 2027 (start date set to 1 January) through spring 2029.
Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens
Hillwood's golden-anniversary show traces gold as material and colour, from Post's gilded boxes, watches and objets d'art to new work by Alfredo Jaar, Tawny Chatmon and Fabiola Jean-Louis.
The Phillips Collection
Beauford Delaney (1901-1979) from 1940s New York street scenes and portraits to 1960s Paris abstraction, hung alongside influences such as Monet and Stuart Davis and peers including Sam Francis and Ed Clark.
Smithsonian American Art Museum · Free
A mid-career survey of nearly forty of Bisa Butler's large-scale quilted portraits, shown alongside work by influences including Faith Ringgold and Betye Saar.
National Museum of Women in the Arts
NMWA's hallmark biennial series returns with contemporary artists' books: sculptural, printed and paper works that rethink what a book can be, chosen with the museum's global committees.
Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens
Hillwood revisits Post's wardrobe for the first time in a decade, drawing on nearly 300 garments and 600 jewels from a childhood christening gown to Belle Epoque couture and later daytime suits.
The Phillips Collection
A 75-work retrospective of the founding Latinx artist Juan Sánchez (b. 1954), grouped as Autobiography, Community, Nation and Utopia. Co-organised with the Whitney and Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico.
National Museum of Women in the Arts
The most comprehensive survey of Gwen John (1876-1939) in over 40 years, uniting her quiet oil portraits with rarely seen drawings and watercolours from Wales to Paris.
The Phillips Collection
Around 70 paintings, 30 works on paper and theatre ephemera from the 1890s to the 1930s, tracing Édouard Vuillard's life as spectator, director and scenographer. Co-organised with the Musée d'Orsay.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.
