“Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams famously wrote to her husband, John, in 1776. “250 Years: American Women Artists and the Nation’s Story” does just that. The nature imagery of Lydia Biddle’s 1795 needlepoint sampler with its geometric tulips and pine trees, holds the promise of the landscape and still-life paintings eventually produced by American women artists in the decades to come. Watercolors on ivory and early oil portraits, several by members of the painterly Peale family, punch above their weight. The story wraps up with Embrace, created in encaustic in 2023 by New Mexico-based Margaret Thompson. Given how long women artists had to fight for the same training and recognition as men, the starched mobcap in Mary Way’s Side Profile of a Woman with a Hat (c. 1810) starts to resemble the crested helmet that the goddess Athena wore into battle. Welcome, women warriors. —Celia McGee