The National Museum of Women in the Arts presented contemporary metalwork by modern-day alchemists in the Washington, DC Heavy Metal, Women to Watch exhibition, June 28 – September 16, 2018. This was the fifth installment of NMWA’s Women to Watch exhibition series, a dynamic collaboration between its national and international outreach affiliates. 20 committees participating in Women to Watch 2018 worked with curators in their respective regions to create shortlists of artists working with metal. From this list, NMWA curators selected the artists whose work was on view in Heavy Metal. 

Featured artists from the US, Latin America and Europe investigated the physical properties and expressive possibilities of metalwork through a wide variety of objects including sculpture, jewelry, and conceptual forms. Works in the exhibition ranged from large-scale installations to small objects designed for personal adornment; these disparate works were fashioned out of iron, steel, bronze, silver, gold, brass, tin, aluminum, copper and pewter. The exhibition aimed to disrupt the predominantly masculine narrative that surrounds metalworking and demonstrated that contemporary women artists carry on a vibrant legacy in the field.

Artists proposed by the Ohio Advisory Group for consideration were:

• Carmel Buckley
• Tracy Featherstone
• Llewelynn Fletcher
• Leila Khoury

Leila Khoury was selected for inclusion in Heavy Metal. Two works were chosen for the exhibition, which was the largest Women to Watch triennial to date and the first to publish a catalog.

Learn more about the exhibition:

• Heavy Metal – NMWA
• artdaily’s coverage of Heavy Metal
• Leila Khoury’s website