Tawny Chatmon's first DC museum show puts gold, embroidery, and Black childhood on the walls of NMWA

Tawny Chatmon's first DC museum show puts gold, embroidery, and Black childhood on the walls of NMWA

Walk into the National Museum of Women in the Arts right now and the first thing you notice is the scale. The portraits are enormous. More than 25 large-scale photographs, dating from 2019 to the present, spread across the gallery. Then you get close enough to see what they are made of, and the scale stops being the point.

Tawny Chatmon, born in 1979 in Tokyo and self-taught, lives and works in Maryland. Through a layered process of photography, painting, and hand-embellishment, she creates works that honor and celebrate the beauty of Black childhood and the Black family, while at times confronting historical misrepresentation and erasure.

The exhibition is called Sanctuaries of Truth, Dissolution of Lies, and it opened on October 15. It runs through March 8, 2026, and is the artist's first museum exhibition in Washington, D.C. That fact alone is worth sitting with. Chatmon has been making work that the art world has been watching for years, and DC is only now getting a proper introduction.

How the pictures are built

Chatmon starts with a camera. "Photography is still the first layer of communication for me," she has said. "After a portrait session is complete, I incorporate various practices, materials and mediums such as digital collage, photo manipulation, acrylic paint, semiprecious stones and gold leaf."

Her photographs are often digitally intensified by exaggerating the hairstyles of her subjects, who are often her children and other family members, and elongating their form, drawing inspiration from the Byzantine period to signify importance. The result is something between a photograph and an icon painting. These large and lushly patterned works depicting children are stylistically inspired by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt as well as Byzantine mosaics.

The newest work in the show pushes the material further. For Chatmon, the materiality of her work is as important as her subjects. Concerns over the ethical sourcing of gold and cobalt, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have led Chatmon away from using genuine gold. Instead, her two new series explore the conceptual and visual possibilities of embroidery and textiles. That is a real decision with real stakes, and you can feel it in the work.

What the show actually contains

This presentation marks a significant evolution in Chatmon's photography-based practice. The exhibition debuts selections from her latest series, "The Restoration" (2021 to present) and "The Reconciliation" (2024 to present), which incorporate assemblage, embroidery, film, and audio narrative. These works broaden the visual language Chatmon established in her iconic gilded series such as "If I'm no longer here, I wanted you to Know..." (2020 to 2021), "Remnants" (2021 to 2023), and "Iconography" (2023 to present), and selections from those series are also on view.

"The Reconciliation" addresses stereotypes surrounding the food of the African diaspora. By reclaiming subjects and stories that have been distorted by racism, Chatmon honors the meals that have nourished Black families for centuries. The series includes an audio component: family members share stories about dishes like soup joumou, adding intimate layers of meaning to the visual work.

Then there is "The Restoration." It was born out of a desire to remove antique racist dolls and figurines from circulation. In it, she features children holding these objects, which the artist has lovingly and carefully repainted and reclothed, symbolically reclaiming Black bodies and histories. It is a quieter set of works than the gilded pieces, and probably the most unsettling thing in the show.

Who it comes from

After more than a decade in commercial and editorial photography, in 2010, her outlook and relationship with her camera shifted when she began photographing her father's battle with cancer, consequently documenting the disease unexpectedly taking his life. That loss redirected everything.

Central to Chatmon's work is the celebration of Black childhood, Black resistance and self-determination, and she often uses her own family members as models. "I originally planned to focus primarily on historical figures as the iconographic imagery," Chatmon said in an interview. "But as I progressed, I felt it was important to focus on the icons within our own families and communities."

NMWA Senior Curator Virginia Treanor has had her eye on Chatmon for some time. "My colleagues and I have followed Chatmon's career avidly for several years, with an eye to developing an exhibition that highlights her inventive vision, powerful iconography and exceptional level of craft," Treanor said.

Why now, and why here

The National Museum of Women in the Arts sits at 1250 New York Avenue NW, two blocks from Metro Center. It is one of the only museums in the world dedicated exclusively to women artists, and it has a history of giving serious solo shows to artists before the rest of the institution world catches up. In Sanctuaries of Truth, Dissolution of Lies, Chatmon uses stylistic languages drawn from historical decorative motifs and potent African American cultural markers to create lush and strikingly powerful portraits that challenge racism and erasure.

This is the artist's first museum exhibition in Washington, D.C. She frames her portraits in gilded antique or contemporary baroque-style frames. These interventions give Chatmon's subjects a gravitas that often belies their youth and confronts the absence, exclusion and devaluation of the Black body in Western art.

That confrontation is not theoretical. The frames cost money. The scale costs time. The embroidery, done by hand, costs attention. Standing in front of one of these portraits, what you feel is weight, the kind that comes not from argument but from accumulated care.

Plan your visit

Tawny Chatmon: Sanctuaries of Truth, Dissolution of Lies is on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Avenue NW, through March 8, 2026. The museum's monthly after-hours series, NMWA Nights, offers extended hours on select evenings for those who want to see the work with fewer people in the room. Check nmwa.org/programs for the current schedule. Admission prices and member benefits are listed on the museum's website.

Sources

• NMWA official exhibition page, nmwa.org
• NMWA press: Advance Exhibition Schedule, nmwa.org
• Tawny Chatmon artist statement, tawnychatmon.com
• Tawny Chatmon biography, Artsy
• Tawny Chatmon, Wikipedia
• L'Oeil de la Photographie, exhibition review
• BmoreArt, "Tawny Chatmon & Rozeal Expand Art's Canon in Two DC Museums"
• The Georgetowner, December 2025
• Modern Luxury Washington DC, exhibition preview