New D.C. Art Fair Lets Women Artists Keep 100% of Sales, Zero Commission

Washington, D.C.'s first FEMME Art Fair opens Thursday at The Square DC downtown, and its organizers are pitching it as more than a weekend of gallery browsing — every artist who sells work there keeps 100 percent of the proceeds. The four-day event, running through Sunday at 1850 K St NW, lands deliberately on Women's Equality Day, and it's built around a blunt pitch to visitors: come look at art made by women, and know that none of the money gets skimmed off the top.

The commission-free structure is central to how the fair is being framed, according to WJLA, which reports that participating artists will not pay any commission on work sold during the event. Producers Sally McBratney and Maggie O'Neill are bringing together a roster of women artists for the inaugural edition, with tickets ranging from $23.18 to $44.52, per Time Out. The fair is presented by D.C. creative group USAN USAN and Our Daughters' Futures Fund, with additional backing from Women Moving Millions and Women Connect4Good, according to the fair's own event listing.

A Muralist's Path From the Lab to the Wall

Among the artists showing work is Ashley Nora, an Indianapolis-based muralist and former analytical chemist who left corporate science in 2019 to paint full-time, according to her Wikipedia entry. Her career has centered on celebrating Black joy through public art and portraiture, and she serves as vice president of the Eighteen Art Collective; she also painted the historic Black Lives Matter street mural on Indiana Avenue.

The fair's four-day run also includes appearances by the anonymous feminist activist collective the Guerrilla Girls, who have used gorilla masks and statistical art to expose sexism and racism in the art world since 1985, according to the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Their scheduled programming includes a conversation panel with former Phillips Collection director Dorothy Kosinski, according to an Eventbrite listing for the fair.

Why Women's Equality Day Was the Chosen Backdrop

Women's Equality Day was officially designated by Congress in 1973 following a resolution introduced by Representative Bella Abzug, commemorating the August 26, 1920, certification of the 19th Amendment, which prohibited denying voting rights on the basis of sex — though women of color faced continued disenfranchisement for decades afterward, per the Office of Civil Rights and Title IX. Organizers are pairing that anniversary with a market-focused argument: women artists still face steep headwinds when it comes to exposure and sales, even as their overall presence in galleries has grown.

Data cited by Vara Art from the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report shows women represented 45 percent of gallery-represented artists in 2025, up from 35 percent in 2018, and generated 44 percent of primary-market sales. Yet those same artists accounted for only 37 percent of total sales value across all dealers, according to the same report. The gap widens further on the resale market — Sotheby's and ArtTactic data cited by Vara Art found women's share of the secondary auction market reached just 13.8 percent in 2024, more than doubling from 6.2 percent in 2018 but still far below parity with male artists.

A Wider Pattern in Museum Collections

The imbalance extends beyond auction houses and into permanent collections. The 2022 Burns Halperin Report found that works by female artists made up only 11 percent of acquisitions and 14.9 percent of exhibitions at 31 major U.S. art museums between 2008 and 2020, according to Studio Burns — this despite women representing roughly half of working visual artists in the country, per the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Co-founder Maggie O'Neill has spent more than 20 years in D.C.'s creative industry, previously co-founding the interior design and fabrication firm Swatchroom before launching the Vote For Your Daughter initiative and Our Daughters' Futures Fund, according to District Fray. The Square DC, which opened in September 2023 as a food and cultural collective inside International Square, has hosted large-scale art fairs before — it previously served as the venue for USAN USAN's commission-free Umbrella Art Fair, according to reporting cited on the venue's history.

Organizers describe FEMME Art Fair as an attempt to directly counter the standard gallery commission model that typically cuts into artist revenue, aiming to build both visibility and direct economic opportunity for women artists in one weekend. The fair runs through Sunday at The Square DC.