Smithsonian Women’s Museum Turns to Augmented Reality as Its Future Remains Unclear
With no designated site for a permanent building, the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum has taken its case to the National Mall itself. The museum has launched Unhidden Heroines, a free augmented reality experience that places five under-recognized American women into the landscape of Washington, DC, as the institution waits for Congress to settle its long-delayed future.
The project, available through 31 December, is the museum’s first AR initiative. It arrives after the US House of Representatives rejected a bill that would have designated a site for the museum, leaving the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum without a home even as the semiquincentennial celebrations unfold. The museum was originally authorized by Congress in 2020.
Unhidden Heroines was nearly a year in development and is designed to be used on a mobile phone or tablet while visitors stand near specific monuments on the Mall. The experience can also be accessed online, including in a non-interactive version. At the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial, visitors encounter Dorothy Height, the Black activist often called the “godmother of the Civil Rights Movement.” At the Lincoln Memorial, the story shifts to Julia Ward Howe, the author, poet, and suffragist best known for writing the lyrics to “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Mary Katharine Goddard, the Maryland printer who published the first version of the Declaration of Independence to list the signatories’ names, appears in relation to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.
The other two figures are Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the 1940s codebreaker, and Polly Cooper, the Oneida woman who aided George Washington’s army during the American Revolution. Each story unfolds as a four-part interactive sequence, with full-size animated figures and objects from their lives appearing in place. The design, according to the museum’s creative team, was meant to give the women the scale and visual authority long reserved for the Mall’s male monuments.
The route links five sites and covers about two miles of walking. It also underscores a larger imbalance: the National Mall draws more than 36 million visitors a year, yet women remain comparatively scarce in its public monuments. For now, the museum is using digital space to occupy a physical one it has not yet been granted.
That strategy may prove especially important if a permanent Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum remains years away. In the meantime, Unhidden Heroines offers a temporary but pointed intervention — one that asks visitors to see the Mall, and the nation’s public memory, differently.
