Georgetown University Art Galleries is pleased to announce its Spring 2026 exhibitions, on view beginning January 23, 2026. The season features unbecoming, a traveling exhibition of work by Diana Al-Hadid from the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, presented in the Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery, and speculative morphologies, featuring Washington, DC–metropolitan region artists Kendall Buster and Linn Meyers, on view in the Lucille M. & Richard F.X. Spagnuolo Gallery. An Opening Reception celebrating the Spring 2026 exhibitions will take place on Friday, January 23, 2026, from 6–8pm.
unbecoming is a survey of paintings and sculptures by Diana Al-Hadid that examines how constructions of femininity take form over time. Grounded in the artist’s research-driven practice, the exhibition explores transformation as both a material and conceptual process, modeling how social expectations surrounding womanhood can be reworked, dismantled and reimagined.
Based in New York, Al-Hadid works prolifically between painting, sculpture, and more recently, handmade paper. Born in Syria in 1981, Al-Hadid moved to the United States as a child. She grew up in Ohio, earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Kent State University, and a Master of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University. Al-Hadid’s work draws on diverse sources ranging from art history to Greek mythology, and global literature. Her visual language emerges from an astute sense of materiality that culminates in specific abstractions; these works defy how we think about both materials and sculpture and in turn, work to unravel the ways of thinking we may see as “normal.”
“Since Al-Hadid completed her MFA, questions of gender and womanhood have been central themes within her artistic practice,” commented Dr. Rachel Winter, assistant curator at the MSU Broad Art Museum and curator of unbecoming. “Specifically, this survey attends to the ways that the artist is constantly subverting our expectations about materials and form, but it also uses this approach to question the ideologies held in society, works of art, and literary references.”
Press release from Georgetown University Art Galleries
Image: Diana Al-Hadid. Mad Medusa. 2023. Linen pulp paint and cotton blowout on abaca base sheet. 76.2 x 101.6 cm. Image courtesy of the artist
