WOMEN'S HISTORY MUSEUM

Early years and background

Barringer and McGowan met while studying at New York University, bonding over highly expressive outfits and a shared interest in cinema, print culture and fashion’s visual languages. They founded Women’s History Museum in New York City out of a desire to create ‘novel and previously unseen images of beauty’, treating fashion as an art medium capable of re-writing who is visible within history.

Women’s History Museum artworks

Women’s History Museum’s artworks span garments, sculpture, print, video, photography and performance, often presented in gesamtkunstwerk environments that blur distinctions between runway, shop, archive and exhibition. Using meticulously sourced historical materials—ranging from vintage clothing and magazines to obscure subcultural ephemera—they reassemble silhouettes and surface details into collaged ensembles that expose how femininity, labour and desire are constructed and policed.

Fashion as collage and embodied archive

From their earliest collections, Women’s History Museum have approached clothing as a form of collage, layering fabrics, found objects and references so each garment functions like an embodied archive. Catwalk shows, videos and photographs often feature friends and fellow artists as models, foregrounding community and collaboration while complicating the line between author, wearer and subject of fashion imagery.

Poupées Gonflables, OTMA’s Body and Her Bed Surrounded by Machines

In Women’s History Museum Biennale: Poupées Gonflables at Springsteen, Baltimore, the duo staged a world of ‘inflatable dolls’, using exaggerated silhouettes and fetish-inflected details to critique the commodification of feminine bodies. Shows such as OTMA’s Body at Gavin Brown’s enterprise and Her Bed Surrounded by Machines at LUMA Westbau in Zurich mined imperial, cinematic and industrial histories, reanimating lost or marginalised female figures through sculptural garments and theatrical staging.

The Massive Disposal of Experience, Grisette à l’enfer and Museum Manu

The exhibition The Massive Disposal of Experience, presented at Company Gallery in New York and CCA Berlin, used clothing racks, vitrines and film to reflect on how women’s labour, taste and emotional lives are rendered disposable by fashion cycles. Their first institutional exhibition in the United States, Grisette à l’enfer at Amant in Brooklyn, takes the historical figure of the grisette—working women behind the fashion industry—as a guide through an infernal shopping environment, combining archival research, sculptural garments and retail display to link glamour with exploitation.

Select Awards and Accolades

• Widely described in international media as one of New York’s most exciting experimental fashion-art labels, with profiles in Vogue, The Face, Wallpaper, and Cultured highlighting their hybrid practice.
• Work acquired by the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, among other collections, recognising the importance of their garments and installations within contemporary art and fashion histories.

To be kept up to date with news relating to Women’s History Museum follow them on Ocula.

Women’s History Museum Exhibitions

Women’s History Museum have presented solo exhibitions and ambitious projects at galleries and institutions in the United States and Europe, alongside participation in group shows that foreground experimental fashion, performance and feminist art.

To be kept up to date with upcoming exhibitions featuring Women’s History Museum follow them on Ocula; you can also view their exhibitions on Ocula.

Select solo exhibitions

• Grisette à l’enfer, Amant, Brooklyn, USA (2025–2026)
• Museum Manu, Company Gallery, New York, USA (2025)
• Screens, Forde, Geneva, Switzerland (2024)
• The Massive Disposal of Experience, Company Gallery, New York, USA; CCA, Berlin, Germany (2022)
• MORT de la MODE... Everything Must Go!, Company Gallery, New York, USA (2021)
• Women’s History Museum Biennale: Poupées Gonflables, Springsteen Gallery, Baltimore, USA (2019)
• Her Bed Surrounded by Machines, LUMA Westbau, Zurich, Switzerland (2018)
• OTMA’s Body, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, USA (2018)

Select group exhibitions

• Group exhibitions at Pratt Manhattan Gallery and Performance Space, New York, Analog Gallery, Beacon, Champ Lacombe, Biarritz, Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris, and the Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, among others.

Sign up to Ocula to follow the artist and learn more about Women’s History Museum’s art for sale.

More Reading

The practice has been the subject of critical essays and interviews in publications including CURA., Cultured, The Face, Wallpaper, Vogue and Interview Magazine, which discuss their research-driven approach and their challenge to how fashion is valued in art contexts. You can follow the artist on Ocula to be updated when new articles are published.

Women's History Museum FAQs

Ocula | 2026