FEMME ART FAIR

The first time I encountered Maggie O’Neil’s work was in 2023, when I attended the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington (RAMMYS) annual event. The piece was a painting with the words "Invest in Women." I remember exactly where I was standing when I saw it, and took a quick photo. In the years since, witnessing the work Vote for Your Daughter does has been a constant light — a thread I keep running into across this city's arts landscape. And every time I come across their work, I know I'm in the right place.

So when FEMME Art Fair opened in downtown DC on Women's Equality Day, I was thrilled to attend as a guest for both bookends of the fair: preview night and the closing event. And the arc between those two nights told its own story.

Preview night had that specific energy of a room that knows it's witnessing something intentional. Four days of thought leadership isn't just a program line either; it's a signal that FEMME understood the assignment was never just "hang the work and hope."

It was a beautiful experience to reconnect with people I've known for years in this ecosystem, and meet new faces doing work I hadn't encountered yet. That's the real metric for me. Not just what sold, (a lot of incredible artwork) but who found each other in the process.

DC's arts landscape has no shortage of ambition, but FEMME is a reminder of what happens when the structure of an event matches its stated values and when "centering women" is a financial model and a curatorial one, not just a tagline. I left both nights with the same thought: this is what it looks like when the resources actually move, not just the rhetoric.

Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington RAMMYS 2023, Maggie O’Neil’s “Invest in Women”