HPS Magazine

Researchers and grassroots activists are working with fungi to restore damaged environments

Environmental toxicologist Danielle Stevenson spreads soil and wood chips inoculated with fungi at a polluted lot in Los Angeles. Adam Amengual

Lauren Oster

Ever since the HBO series “The Last of Us” hit screens in 2023, people have grilled Danielle Stevenson with their fears over a mushroom-induced dystopia. On the show, a fungus mutates and sparks a global zombie apocalypse, and as a scientist who studies fungi and how they can actually help society, Stevenson is ready to assuage their concerns.

“A common question in the public space is, ‘But if you use fungi to eat pollution, will they eat our house and our building and our faces and the whole world?’” Stevenson says.

“They will not,” she often answers. “They’re a nature-based approach to handling our waste.”

Stevenson’s work focuses on mycoremediation, a technique that uses fungi to rehabilitate polluted land. Mycoremediation harnesses fungi’s natural abilities to collect contaminants scattered in soil and either concentrate them so that they can be removed or break them down into materials that aren’t harmful.

The fungal kingdom is host to an estimated 2.2 million to 3.8 million species, ranging from single-celled yeasts to the largest organism in the world, a sprawling member of the honey mushroom genus that occupies more than 2,000 acres of soil in eastern Oregon. Once considered more similar to plants than animals, fungi can’t create their own food through photosynthesis; instead, most of them obtain nutrients from dead or decaying organic matter. To do so, fungal cells secrete enzymes that break insoluble carbohydrates down into simpler sugars that those cells can absorb and store. That ability to decompose and metabolize nutrients makes them invaluable contributors to ecosystems around the world. Fungi transform materials that plants and animals otherwise wouldn’t be able to use to their benefit.Report This Ad

Fungi can convert complex toxins such as petrochemicals and pesticides into simpler molecules that they and other organisms can repurpose. They also absorb and concentrate heavy metals like lead and cadmium, which remain intact in their biomass and can be relocated safely when the fungi are harvested. Workers have an easier time picking mushrooms that accumulate lead and disposing of them at a landfill, for example, than excavating and relocating tons of lead-riddled soil.

“The Last of Us”—and the video game franchise it’s based on—imagine scenarios where fungi take over the world. The reality, as Stevenson is eager to discuss as a consultant and educator, is that they can play a significant role in our environments—and they are powerful potential partners in human-led efforts to restore polluted spaces. “We can transform contaminated sites into parks, green spaces and affordable housing,” she says. “There’s just so much potential for this type of approach to work on a lot of different problems at the same time.”

Initial explorations

Persistent human-made chemicals called chlorophenols areused to manufacture products like pharmaceuticals, agricultural chemicals and dyes that eventually become hazardous pollutants. Those byproducts—and heavy metals like lead, mercury, cadmium and chrome—can remain in the environment after serving their industrial purposes, contaminating soil and posing a threat to both environmental and human health.

Scientists’ first inkling that fungi could help solve the problems caused by these pollutants came in 1963. In the Journal of Phytopathology, plant-disease expert Horst Lyr reported that the enzymes white rot fungi use to degrade lignin—a complex polymer found in and between plants’ cell walls—could also be used to break down chlorophenols.

Around the same time, U.S. government researchers Catherine G. Duncan and Flora J. Deverall demonstrated that wood-inhabiting fungi could also be used to achieve this aim.

Researchers following in these pioneers’ footsteps zeroed in on Phanerochaete chrysosporium, a crust fungus that grows on the dying or dead parts of woody plants and forms flat, almost feathery fruiting bodies—as opposed to mushroom shapes.

They treated it as the model white rot fungus for study—much as the fast-breeding, easily alterable fruit fly has formed the basis of many geneticists’ experiments. In the crust fungus’s case, the ease and speed with which it can be grown and handled in a lab and its efficacy in breaking down lignin made it an ideal investigative focus.

By the mid-1980s, biochemists at Michigan State University were publishing evidence that, in experimental conditions, this crust funguscould degrade pollutants like the insecticide DDT, polychlorinated biphenyls and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. With these findings, the field of what we now call mycoremediation research beckoned investigators around the world. In the three decades since the team in Michigan published their research, that influential work has been cited more than 1,400 times.

Mycoremediation in your neighborhood

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Mycologist Paul Stamets coined the term mycoremediation in Mycelium Running, an influential primer on growing mushrooms “for the purpose of reaping both personal and planetary rewards.” Stevenson, meanwhile, is a bioremediation specialist putting mycoremediation techniques to work in her community. She serves on a council within a California Environmental Protection Agency department that protects communities from toxic substances, researches and develops methods to decontaminate land, and compels manufacturers to make safer products. She earned her PhD in environmental toxicology from the University of California, Riverside, studying three Los Angeles-area brownfields, areas where redevelopment or reuse is potentially problematic due to the presence of hazardous substances. Using previously untested combinations of fungi and plants, she and her team inoculated and seeded wood chips and soil at the sites with species intended to convert and concentrate toxic contaminants.

The initial results from that pilot study were encouraging. After just three months, she saw on average about a 50 percent reduction in all organic contaminants in the soil—such as diesel, gasoline and solvents. After a year, the contaminants were almost undetectable in treated plots. Stevenson also found that arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi—fungi that live in plants’ root tissue and collect nutrients for those plants in exchange for sugar—enhanced the plants’ abilities to take up heavy metals such as lead. That result ran contrary to previous studies that had suggested plants simply weren’t effective at removing toxins like lead from soil; in fact, all they needed was a little teamwork. Those previous studies didn’t include fungi, says Stevenson. “We saw significant reductions compared to not treating at all; depending on the metal, [it averaged between] 15 and 50 percent removal in just a year,” she says. “That’s really something.”

The City of Los Angeles funded Stevenson’s research—for good reason. The conventional method of addressing contaminated soil, known as “dig and dump,” involves hauling it up with a bulldozer, then transporting it to another disposal site. It’s disruptive, costly and time-consuming, and “dig and dump” doesn’t solve the problem of toxic materials, it just relocates them elsewhere. Soil treated with fungi, however, can be removed and incinerated or repurposed much more cheaply.Report This Ad

Stevenson adds the metals we’ve scattered across the country aren’t going to disappear; our responsibility isn’t to wish them out of existence but to minimize their potential for harm.

Her pilot study awaits peer review and publication. Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of opportunities for her colleagues to replicate her work; the United States is home to anywhere from 450,000 to 1 million brownfields.

“A 50 percent reduction in soil contaminants after three months of bioremediation does seem possible,” says Mia Maltz, a soil microbial ecologist at the University of Connecticut. Maltz served as the lead author on a meta-analysis of how soil inoculation with different species of mycorrhizal fungi can affect degraded ecosystems. Launched in 2023, her lab investigates how fungi and other microbes can foster ecological resilience. Maltz notes that other studies have shown reduced levels of toxins and heavy metals akin to Stevenson’s reported results within a similar time frame.

What Maltz finds interesting about Stevenson’s work is the evidence she’s collecting of how different microbes and soil conditions might enhance or hinder the uptake of heavy metals. “Having field trials like [Stevenson’s] helps to build the knowledge base of which plants are able to accumulate metals in which conditions promote their uptake,” she says.

Stevenson’s methods echo locally through an initiative in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where high school students are trained on hands-on bioremediation techniques. The project arose because some of her test sites were right next to a high school. “It’s a way of trying to get resources and opportunities into the communities most burdened by these polluted sites,” she says.

Mycoremediation in the wake of wildfires

In the summer of 2020, a catastrophic fire in central California raged for 38 days, destroyed nearly 1,500 buildings and burned more than 86,000 acres of land. Following that initial devastation, Maya Elson—a mycologist and educator—sprang into action. She and her colleagues at CoRenewal, an environmental nonprofit group that promotes biodiversity and community-led responses to natural disasters, knew that the rainy season would send toxic runoff from devastated structures coursing down eroded hillsides to pollute local waterways and endanger aquatic life. So they installed filter socks—long, mesh tubes stuffed with absorbent straw that create physical barriers to prevent ash, sediment and chemicals from eroding and contaminating more land and water. They would also be the perfect materials for a mycoremediation project.

At about 20 different burn sites in Bonny Doon, a mountain community inland from Santa Cruz, she inoculated the filter socks with local strains of oyster mushrooms, knowing that the straw would be a fantastic food source for those mushrooms. As the fungi feasted on the straw and developed a mycelial network between its fibers, they created both a physical and a biological impediment to the toxic runoff. As in the brownfields, Elson explains, “the fungi can biodegrade petroleum-based, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and it can hold on to the heavy metals from the debris.”

That preliminary round of experimentation expanded into a larger investigation of how fungi can help heal soil after wildfire, with sites from southern Oregon all the way down to Southern California. (Many experiments have tested these measures in the lab, but research from disaster sites is far rarer.) Elson and her colleagues are now looking to tackle toxins and to investigate how their inoculated filter socks might support other efforts. How could their tweaks to that existing technology, for example, assist in efforts to regenerate damaged ecosystems? They’re also looking at more types of inoculants for the world beyond their regional oyster mushrooms.

The inoculated silt-sock technique has made its way across the Pacific to Hawaii, where the Maui Bioremediation Group has put local strains of fungi to work in service of recovery from the catastrophic Lahaina fire in August 2023. That group is developing a Hawaii-specific approach to bioremediation that includes treating carbon-rich charcoal created from plant matter with a compost “tea” composed of fungi and other microorganisms collected from the same areas where they’ll be installed; they then stuff that charcoal and wood chips inoculated with Pleurotus cystidiosus (the abalone oyster mushroom) in their biofiltration socks.Report This Ad

Like Stevenson, Elson is anxious both to have results to present to the scientific community and to share effective remediation methodologies far and wide. “We get people reaching out to us from all over that want solutions, and we have a robust enough body of scientific research to demonstrate that these methods are worth trying,” she says. “However, it is a newer science, and we are looking to better understand the full extent of the possibilities and to refine our methodologies.”

Maltz can speak to those efforts with authority: She is the primary investigator for the multistate effort to which Elson’s Post-Fire Biofiltration Initiative project contributed. In partnership with the Glassman Lab at the University of California, Riverside, and researchers in its College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences and Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology, the Fire Ecology in X-Site study explores how inoculation with fungi can restore fire-affected soil. As long as communities use proper protective equipment, Maltz explains, using biofiltration techniques like Elson’s have potential to support restoration after fires. “I have some concerns about using non-native species for this work, especially in burned forests or in the wildland urban interface,” she says. Bringing over local species from unburned areas near burn sites and pairing them with biodegradable onsite materials, she says, likely has the best potential for success.

As for what she believes should come next, more peer-reviewed articles highlighting those and similar approaches could expand scientists’ understanding of what’s possible. “I’d like to see more studies using native fungi, either from burned or neighboring unburned systems,” Maltz says. When fire damages land, a natural succession of plants and fungi—known as fire-following species—begins the process of regeneration. “Using some of those fungal taxa, collecting and cultivating them, and using their mycelium would be important both in lab-based studies and for field ecological experiments,” Maltz says.

Experts emphasize the importance of following best practices and honoring scientific principles while exploring solutions to planetary emergency. As the authors of a recent research review in Applied Science , an “approach must be tested on a laboratory scale before being replicated in real field situations.”

Healing beyond cease-fires

Leila Darwish, a bioremediation specialist and the author of Earth Repair, researches conflict zones and has found that in the aftermath of devastation caused by war, natural strategies have potential to assist in healing the land. A mycofiltration technique analogous to Elson’s, for example, could intercept contaminated runoff from a bombed building. Pollutants from explosives, in turn, could be broken down with fungi much as they are in industrial brownfields.Report This Ad

“Mycoremediation used in combination with phytoremediation, microbial remediation, biochar [toxin-absorbing charcoal created with wood and plants], and other innovative strategies can offer important tools for healing the complex, toxic and deeply damaged landscapes left behind by war,” she says.

A recent research review in the Journal of Fungi evaluating attempts at remediating conflict-affected soil between 1980 and 2023 echoes her observations. Its authors conclude that there is “vast proof of the effectiveness of fungi” for breaking down or accumulating and sequestering five classes of warfare pollutants (metals, metalloids, explosives, radioactive elements and herbicides)—and that mycoremediation doesn’t destroy soil the way decontaminating it by incinerating it does. Considering that benefit is important, they note, “given the growing demand for food and arable land.”

Mycoremediation practices won’t completely rescue us, Stevenson says, but they can connect us. “I’ve shown up to give talks that people have titled ‘Mushrooms Will Save the World!’—and it’s not that way,” she adds. “I actually think it’s better.” Looking for so-called heroes is disempowering, she says, adding that small actions taken together, locally, will always outpace individual agents of change.Editors’ note, May 14, 2025: This article has been updated to identify Danielle Stevenson as a bioremediation expert and correct a caption that misidentified a location. We regret the errors.

A new exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts spotlights 40 women who found fame in the Low Countries between 1600 and 1750, including Koerten, Judith Leyster and Clara Peeters

A portrait of Johanna Koerten, whose “thread painting” for the wife of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I sold for more money than Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, one of the most famous artworks of all time Rijksmuseum via Wikimedia Commons

Meilan Solly – Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

Around the turn of the 17th century, the Dutch artist Johanna Koerten sold a “sublime work consisting of flowers, arms, eagles [and] crowns, decorated in foliage, of woven silk in a rustic manner,” to the wife of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I. According to the biographer who wrote this description, the empress paid at least 4,000 guilders for the textile—more than double the amount received by Koerten’s better-known contemporary, Rembrandt van Rijn, for his monumental 1642 masterpiece, The Night Watch.

Today, The Night Watch is one of the most famous paintings of all time, its creator lionized as one of the greatest artists to ever live. Meanwhile, the Koerten “thread painting” that once commanded a higher price than Rembrandt’s group portrait is lost, and its creator is virtually unknown to the general public.

A new exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C. seeks to correct this gender imbalance, arguing that women were instrumental in defining the visual culture of the 17th-century Low Countries, which encompassed modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands. Organized in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, “Women Artists From Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750” features nearly 150 artworks by 40 women, many of which are on view in the United States for the first time.

Paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints form the bulk of the art on display, but the show also highlights embroidery, lace and paper cuttings. These mediums have long been overlooked as “women’s work,” but they were highly valued in the 17th and 18th centuries, as evidenced by the high prices fetched by Koerten’s work. “I cannot overemphasize … how famous she was in her day,” says NMWA’s Virginia Treanor, who co-curated the exhibition with the Museum of Fine Art’s Frederica van Dam.Report This Ad

While modern observers might think that Koerten was the exception rather than the norm, Treanor points out that many of the female artists featured in the show, including Judith Leyster, Clara Peeters and Rachel Ruysch, “were very well known during their lifetimes. They were praised for their achievements. This is to dispel any kind of notion that women were not allowed to make art in the 17th century or that they were toiling away in obscurity.” In truth, Treanor adds, “it was social status, even more so than gender, that really determined” whether women had access to artistic training and opportunities.

The show is the “first exhibition of its kind to rewrite the art history of this culturally significant era from the perspective of women artists,” says NMWA’s director, Susan Fisher Sterling. (The era in question was formerly known as the “Dutch Golden Age,” a term that has fallen out of favor in recent years as cultural institutions reckon with the role of slavery and colonialism in enabling this period of prosperity.) Museums around the world have staged exhibitions on some of the individual artists featured, and NMWA hosted a smaller-scale exhibition featuring 20 paintings and prints by eight female artists in 2019. But as Treanor says in a statement, “there has never before been a survey exhibition devoted to multiple women artists and diverse artistic mediums of the period.”

Asserting presence through self-portraits and signatures

“Women Artists From Antwerp to Amsterdam” is divided into four thematic sections: presence, choices, economy, and legacy and value. Up first is presence, which examines the ways in which women asserted their status as artists during the 17th and early 18th centuries. “Whether they depicted themselves with the tools of their trade or conspicuously and proudly placed their signatures on their work, women were not hesitant to declare their roles as creators,” reads the exhibition’s wall text.Report This Ad

Around 1630, when Leyster was in her early 20s, she created a famous self-portrait that shows the artist smiling as she turns to face the viewer, looking away from the painting in progress on her easel. Her pose is relaxed and her expression confident, conveying the message that Leyster is in her element—a fact underscored by the 18-plus paintbrushes she grasps in her left hand. Comparatively, a later self-portrait is more subdued, showing an older woman with a bold but less strident gaze. Yet Leyster is “still presenting herself as a painter” by holding a palette and a paintbrush, says Treanor. “That’s how she’s identifying herself,” even after she’d married and had children.

Maria Schalcken’s Self-Portrait in Her Studio (circa 1680) similarly portrays its creator at work, caught in the act of painting a landscape. Art historians had previously attributed the portrait to Schalcken’s brother, Godefridus Schalcken, but conservation in the late 20th century revealed her signature on the canvas. Interestingly, the only other surviving painting by Maria was also misattributed to Godefridus, as the piece’s signature only includes the siblings’ last name. The Leiden Collection, which houses Boy Offering Grapes to a Woman (circa 1675-1682), posits that a former owner erased Schalcken’s first name from the signature, which otherwise closely matches the one on her self-portrait, “evidently [thinking] it might prove more profitable to let it pass for a work by Godefridus.”Report This Ad

Another female artist who used her signature to claim authorship was the Flemish sculptor Maria Faydherbe. Several of her small-scale wood sculptures feature the carved Latin phrase “Maria Faydherbe me fecit,” or “Maria Faydherbe made me.” Mechelen, the Flemish city where Faydherbe was based, “was a pre-eminent center for these types of sculptures, but it was very unusual for wood carvers to sign their outputs,” says co-curator van Dam.

In addition to signing her name to her work, Faydherbe argued that she was just as skilled as the male sculptors in the Mechelen artists’ guild, “brazenly and boastfully” dismissing them as “hack workers,” according to a 1633 petition presented by the men in question. (Some female artists, like Leyster and Ruysch, were members of guilds, which “controlled the local markets and protected their members against competition from the outside,” per the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. But others, including Faydherbe, made a living without guild support.)

The decisions that shaped women’s artistic careers

Whether a Dutch or Flemish woman could pursue a career in art during the 17th and 18th centuries often came down to her family. Some of the featured individuals, from Catarina Ykens II to Maria de Grebber, were born into artistic families that encouraged their children to learn the trade. These women trained alongside their brothers or fathers; in many instances, relatives mirrored their loved ones’ artistic styles.Report This Ad

“All the artists employed in a family business produced works in a similar style, which were then marketed under a single ‘brand name’ and were often signed exclusively by the head of the studio, that is to say a registered (male) guild master,” write Treanor and Inez De Prekel, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, in the exhibition catalog.

In the show, artist Magdalena van de Passe is represented by an engraving of Katherine Villiers, the English Duchess of Buckingham, whom Treanor describes as the “Taylor Swift of her time.” On the back of the copper plate, a child has etched a crude copy of the portrait, leaving markings that “speak to the familial nature of the van de Passe workshop,” write Treanor and De Prekel in the catalog.

Fun facts: The scandalous Villiers family

• Born Katherine Manners, the future Duchess of Buckingham was one of the wealthiest heiresses in Great Britain. In 1620, she married George Villiers, a favorite of England’s king, James I.
• James showered George with immense favor, elevating him from cupbearer to one of the highest-ranking men in the kingdom in just a few years. Both at the time and in the centuries since, observers speculated that the pair’s relationship was romantic in nature. The king referred to his favorite as “my sweetheart” or “sweet child and wife.”

For those who weren’t raised in a bustling family workshop, wealth was a deciding factor in whether a woman had access to creative opportunities. Middle- and upper-class families could afford to send their daughters to train with established artists, as Rusych did with still life painter Willem van Aelst. (Leyster, whose family wasn’t particularly wealthy, nevertheless managed to obtain an apprenticeship with a master painter, likely the Dutch artist Frans Hals.) Women born into poorer families, however, had few options when it came to artistic pursuits. They had to work to survive, and this work often involved lace-making.

“Think about all those great 17th-century portraits—Rembrandt, Frans Hals—everyone’s wearing lace,” says Treanor. “Who made all that lace? … It was women, and it was usually women of the lower classes.”

Works on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art present two distinct visions of women’s labor. Nicolaes Maes’ The Lacemaker (circa 1656) shows a young mother leaning over an incomplete piece of lace as the baby beside her placidly peers out at the viewer. It’s “a quiet and intimate moment,” according to Treanor, aptly fitting into the popular 17th-century genre of solitary women at work in serene domestic spaces.Report This Ad

While this vision isn’t “completely inaccurate,” the curator adds, “the reality was a bit different,” as exemplified by Geertruydt Roghman’s series Five Feminine Occupations (circa 1640-1657). The five engravings depict women engaged in everyday household tasks, like cleaning, cooking, sewing and spinning. In Two Women Sewing, Roghman rejects romanticization, showing one of her subjects bent over her work, straining her eyes to see by the waning light of a candle as she warms her feet in the freezing room. The artist is “really capturing, dare I say, the drudgery of a lot of daily domestic work,” Treanor says.

Another painting that speaks to the centrality of choice—or lack thereof—is an enormous portrait borrowed from the Maidens’ House, a former orphanage in Antwerp, Belgium. In the background of the scene, dozens of young girls make lace as the charitable institution’s patrons smile proudly in the foreground. “This painting … allows us to talk about issues of class, because of course these were all poorer girls, not necessarily orphans, but maybe girls whose families couldn’t afford their upkeep, who would be sent to homes like this to receive an education and learn a skill that they could then take into domestic work in wealthier households,” Treanor says. The contrast between lace, “a very expensive material to procure, being made by children who were being housed and clothed and fed but not being paid for their labor, necessarily,” is evident.

During this period, marrying and having children often—but not always—altered women’s artistic pursuits. Art historians previously thought that Leyster stopped painting after she wed fellow artist Jan Miense Molenaer in 1636, but the rediscovery of her later self-portrait, as well as a 1654 still life of flowers in a vase, suggests otherwise. Some women rejected marriage altogether, instead choosing a religious life. Ykens, for one, decided to become a spiritual daughter, taking a vow of chastity and piety without needing to move to a convent and live as a nun. “She could live in her own house, and she could build the career she wanted,” van Dam says. “Apparently, she wanted to paint.”

How women drove the artistic economy

A foundational argument of the exhibition is that women played a significant role in the Low Countries’ artistic economy, whether by producing lace and fine textiles or selling their art to international buyers. Antwerp boasted a lively open art market in the 17th century, with artists creating works on speculation instead of waiting around for a wealthy patron to commission a portrait or a church to commission an altarpiece. A pair of Clara Peeters paintings held by NMWA and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp feature virtually identical carp, suggesting the artist probably used a type of stencil to reproduce certain elements across multiple still lifes. “It wasn’t just her,” Treanor says. “Many other artists did this, too, to be able to reproduce [art] more quickly, because the more paintings they can sell, the more quickly they can sell, the more money they’re going to get.”

Another money-savvy artist spotlighted in the show is Johanna Vergouwen, who painted copies of old master canvases for export to South America. Her re-creations of history paintings by Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck won her acclaim from a contemporary biographer, who wrote that she painted every stroke “as exactingly as the original’s art, / Such wondrous power her celebrated brush imparts.” As van Dam writes in the exhibition catalog, “At the time, the copying and imitation of works of art was viewed as a separate profession and appreciated as an artistic skill in its own right.”Report This Ad

“Women Artists From Antwerp to Amsterdam” also explores the dark side of the era’s thriving economy, which relied heavily on slavery. Botanical artist Maria Sibylla Merian created watercolors of the flora and fauna of Suriname, which was then a Dutch colony in South America. Much of the information she relayed back home came from enslaved people. “She readily credits them for imparting knowledge to her, for helping her procure specimens, but also for imparting knowledge about the uses of particular plants,” says Treanor. One such plant, the peacock flower, was used by some enslaved women to abort their pregnancies, as they didn’t want their children to be born into slavery. “It’s this really kind of chilling window into this moment in history,” Treanor adds. “It’s this imparting of knowledge from women to women.”

The legacy and value of female artists

The final section of the exhibition examines why these female artists have been overshadowed by their male peers for centuries.

Biographies written by the women’s contemporaries show that they were highly respected during their lifetimes, even if they were later eclipsed by their male peers in the art historical canon. In The Great Theater of Netherlandish Painters and Paintresses, an early 18th-century book on display at NMWA, three women (including Koerten) are honored with engraved portraits. Anna Maria van Schurman, a printmaker and painter who was the first woman to attend university in the Dutch Republic, not only appears on the same page as Rembrandt but is also featured more prominently than him, at the top of a group of three artists.

Yet museums established in Europe and the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries overwhelmingly collected works by male artists rather than female artists—a trend that persists today. Treanor points to Koerten, who was best known for her painstakingly crafted paper cuttings, emphasizing the gap between how works were valued in the 17th century versus today. Although “lace was much more expensive to procure than painting,” few of these intricate fabrics have been preserved. As the exhibition’s wall text notes, “A traditional artistic hierarchy, which holds representational art such as painting and sculpture at the apex, has long excluded mediums in which women were prominent, such as textile works.”

One of the paintings featured in the show, Leyster’s Boy Holding Grapes and a Hat (circa 1630), was originally attributed to Hals. The two artists’ styles are so similar that some experts think the former trained under the latter. In the 1970s, when scholars suggested the work should be reattributed to Leyster, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art decided to sell it. The canvas resurfaced in 2022 amid a wave of renewed interest in Leyster, and the Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire acquired it for an undisclosed sum of money “on par with what a [Hals] painting would bring in,” says Treanor. “That’s just a little snapshot of the fluctuations of how art by women has been valued.”

Though “Women Artists From Antwerp to Amsterdam” represents a milestone in the ongoing effort to restore women to the art historical canon, more work remains to be done. “Women were a really integral part of the artistic economy of the time, and we really haven’t seen that represented in the art history of the period,” Treanor says. “And that can affect a lot of different things. That affects how paintings and textiles are conserved—or not. It can affect the market value of works. It can affect our understanding of the time period overall if we only have one side of the story.”“Women Artists From Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750” is on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. through January 11, 2026.

The paintings came from the French Impressionist’s time in Italy with his wife, Alice, in 1908

Kayla Randall – Digital Editor, Museums

Venice was “too beautiful to be painted,” according to Claude Monet. Yet he painted the Italian city anyway.

In 1908, the famed French Impressionist and his wife, Alice, visited Venice. When they arrived, he told her that the city was “too beautiful” to paint, adding that he was “too old to paint such beautiful things.” He was in his late 60s at the time and didn’t want to go to the city in the first place, Lisa Small, senior curator of European art at the Brooklyn Museum, tells Smithsonian magazine. But his wife encouraged him to come with her on a holiday there, and eventually he agreed. He became enchanted by the location’s light and atmosphere and was able to overcome his doubts.

Monet spent two months in Venice and made 37 oil-on-canvas paintings inspired by his time there, 29 of which debuted in 1912 at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris. Now, the Brooklyn Museum has brought together 19 of Monet’s original Venetian paintings for a new exhibition, “Monet and Venice,” running from October 11 to February 1, 2026. After the show closes in Brooklyn, it will travel to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in March 2026.

Monet’s initial reluctance to paint the city was representative of his artistic anxiety, says Small. Venice had been painted so many times at that point and was heavily mythologized. “If you’re going to try your hand at something that other artists have been painting literally for 500 years … it’s got to be a little bit daunting,” she says.

One review of the 1912 exhibition found that Monet’s views of the city successfully showed “that there is no subject, however hackneyed it may seem, that cannot be renewed and magnified by interpretation.”

Now, in a review of the 2025 exhibition, ARTNews’ Alex Greenberger writes that the showcase “is nothing short of a revelation.”

Monet is best known for his paintings of water lilies; his paintings of Venice are thus generally lesser known.

“I was interested in focusing on this chapter in his career because it was so discreet,” says Small, who co-curated “Monet and Venice” with Melissa Buron, director of collections and chief curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum. While some of the Venice paintings have appeared in other shows over the years, the Brooklyn Museum’s new exhibition is the first “that really takes that group of work as its focus, as the heart of the exhibition since 1912,” Small adds.

Key takeaways: Monet’s time in Venice

• The artist visited Venice only once, on a 1908 holiday with his wife, Alice.
• His trip resulted in 37 paintings of the city, and 19 of them will be displayed at the Brooklyn Museum starting on October 11.

While Monet’s work is celebrated now, and he’s often credited with being the leader of the Impressionist movement, Small says that when he was painting, his work wasn’t as accepted.

His style, with its visible brushstrokes, bright colors and soft appearance, is ingrained and well recognized in the art world today. But it was radical in its time, and some critics didn’t like it, Small says.

As a curator of historical European art, she likes to note that “all art was contemporary at one time or another.”

Alongside Monet’s works, the museum will also feature visions of Venice by other artists, including Canaletto, John Singer Sargent and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The Brooklyn Museum’s composer-in-residence, Niles Luther, wrote a symphony that plays in the final gallery of the exhibition. Luther traveled to Venice to find the same inspiration that Monet did, and his resulting symphony, Souvenir: Venise d’Après Monet, is meant to reflect the artist’s paintings and the city’s environment.

In addition to exploring Monet’s Venice paintings alongside the work of other artists, the exhibition also provides context on how the artworks fit into his own life and career. Monet was a perfect match for Venice because he “was a painter of water,” says Small.

“He was a painter of light for sure—we all know that from Impressionism—but he was a painter of water throughout his entire career,” the curator explains. “We wanted to really show how Venice as a theme, a place where you’re surrounded by water and buildings are reflected in the water, ended up being the perfect Monet motif—an artist obsessed with reflections.”

“Monet and Venice” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City from October 11 to February 1, 2026.