Image: National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC
The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, is presenting 'Marlo Pascual: Making Something Out of Something', a 17-work exhibition focused on the artist’s transformations of found photographs. On view from July 24, 2026, to February 28, 2027, the show gathers works made between 2009 and 2014 and is installed in the Mary Ross Taylor Galleries on the museum’s fourth floor.
According to NMWA, Pascual’s practice blurs the boundary between photography and sculpture by recasting anonymous images sourced from thrift stores and their online counterparts. The exhibition description emphasizes her use of enlargement, fragmentation, and obfuscation to interrupt viewers’ expectations. In the museum’s framing, those interventions can make the pictures humorous, but they also introduce discomfort through cropped limbs, obscured faces, and images physically altered by shattering, tearing, or folding.
The museum says Pascual frequently encased enlarged prints in thick Plexiglas and paired them with common, unexpected objects, giving the works a new aesthetic charge. By expanding photographs well beyond their original scale, sometimes to a size comparable to furniture or sculpture, she asserted the physical presence of images that might otherwise be read as flat or disposable. The exhibition presents those strategies as the core of Pascual’s method of recontextualization.
Pascual, born in Nashville in 1972 and who died in Philadelphia in 2020, is represented in the show by examples spanning the years 2009 through 2014. NMWA describes the presentation as demonstrating how dramatic shifts in scale, the addition of repurposed objects, and other transformations prompted viewers to see everyday imagery from a new perspective. The exhibition also appears to connect Pascual’s pictorial source material to the museum’s broader interest in artists whose work complicates familiar categories.
NMWA’s current-exhibitions page identifies the artist’s legacy as a focus of the display and describes Pascual’s work as “uncanny and compelling.” The museum, which says it is the first museum in the world dedicated solely to championing women through the arts, is located at 1250 New York Ave. NW and is open Tuesday through Sunday. Exhibition hours for 'Marlo Pascual: Making Something Out of Something' are Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with hours subject to change.
The exhibition page notes that 'Marlo Pascual: Making Something Out of Something' is organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts and generously supported by the members of NMWA. The museum’s site also lists related public programming during the same period, including a Free Community Day on August 12, 2026, and a #5WomenArtists Tour: Sculpture on August 15, 2026, though those events are separate from the Pascual exhibition itself.
