Welcome to our new website, your gateway to an ever-growing number of Arkansas women artists and to the internationally recognized museum in Washington, D.C. whose name we bear: the National Museum of Women in the Arts. We’re so glad you’re here, because the arts mean nothing without an audience.
The Museum in Washington shows you what women from around the world have to say in art, up close and personal. The Arkansas Committee of NMWA exists to offer you a look at the contributions of women artists in our home state. We work with the National Museum to ensure that Arkansas women are represented there to an international audience. Together we present a changing variety of women’s voices telling our stories in many different art forms.
Come back often this year because it’s a big one for the Museum and the Arkansas Committee. For the first time since it opened in 1991, the National Museum facility is being radically updated to offer more exhibition galleries and classrooms, better conditions for the collections, and ease of visitor access. The renovated Museum reopens Oct. 24. The Arkansas Committee celebrates this milestone with a new website designed to integrate seamlessly with the website of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Our close partnership via the internet wasn’t even a dream when the Arkansas Committee was launched in 1989, before cell phones were universal; before Facebook, before Instagram, before streaming. Now our website offers you galleries of women artists from Arkansas along with updates from our state tour of Women to Watch and views of past state exhibitions in publications and video. We also post highlights from and links to programs at the Museum in Washington and at nearby museums and art spaces so you have access to a bigger picture at all times.
This website was made possible by the dedicated volunteer work of a brilliant committee: Sandy Alstadt (lead), Anna Swaim, Jeanne Parham, Ann Shackelford, Kinya Christian and Jaquita Ball. We appreciate the encouragement and assistance of the NMWA staff throughout the year of development, and thank the Alice L. Walton Foundation for a gift which enabled the Arkansas Committee to carry out the website project, making more art accessible to Arkansans.
MaryRoss Taylor
ACNMWA President