The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM; formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in

Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...

, part of the

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums, Education center, education and Research institute, research centers, created by the Federal government of the United States, U.S. government "for the increase a ...

. Together with its branch museum, the

Renwick Gallery The Renwick Gallery is a branch of the Smithsonian American Art Museum located in Washington, D.C. that displays American craft and decorative arts from the 19th to 21st century. The gallery is housed in a National Historic Landmark building that ...

, SAAM holds one of the world's largest and most inclusive collections of art made in the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

from the colonial period to the present. More than 7,000 artists are represented in the museum's collection. Most exhibitions are held in the museum's main building, the

Old Patent Office Building The Old Patent Office Building is a historic building in Washington, D.C. that covers an entire city block between F and G Streets and 7th and 9th Streets NW in the Penn Quarter section of Chinatown. Built 1836–1867 in the Greek Revival styl ...

(which is shared with the

National Portrait Gallery National Portrait Gallery may refer to: * National Portrait Gallery (Australia), in Canberra * National Portrait Gallery (Sweden), in Mariefred *National Portrait Gallery (United States), in Washington, D.C. *National Portrait Gallery, London ...

), while craft-focused exhibitions are shown in the Renwick Gallery. Smithsonian American Art Museum National Portrait Gallery Exterior

The museum provides electronic resources to schools and the public through its national education program. It maintains seven online research databases with more than 500,000 records, including the Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture that document more than 400,000 artworks in public and private collections worldwide. Since 1951, the museum has maintained a traveling exhibition program; as of 2013, more than 2.5 million visitors have seen the exhibitions.

Attendance

In 2022 the museum received 1,100,000 visitors, ranking it seventh in the

List of most-visited museums in the United States This is a list of the most-visited museums in the United States in 2024. It is based upon the statistics of the Smithsonian Institution Newsroom (January 2025) and the annual survey of museum attendance by the ''Art Newspaper'' published in ...

History

The museum's history can be traced to the creation of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846. The act of Congress establishing the Smithsonian called for it to include "a gallery of art". In its early years, however, little effort was put into developing the art collection, as Smithsonian Secretary

Joseph Henry Joseph Henry (December 17, 1797– May 13, 1878) was an American physicist and inventor who served as the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He was the secretary for the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, a precursor ...

preferred to focus on scientific research. The collection was first on display in the original Smithsonian Building (now known as the Castle). In 1865, a fire destroyed much of the collection. Those art holdings that survived were mostly loaned to the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...

and the

Corcoran Gallery of Art The Corcoran Gallery of Art is a former art museum in Washington, D.C., that is now the location of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, a part of the George Washington University. Founded in 1869 by philanthropist William Wilson Corco ...

in the following decades. In 1896, the artworks were brought back to the Smithsonian, after Congress appropriated money to construct a fireproof room for them. The Smithsonian began to refer to its art collection as the National Gallery of Art in 1906, in connection with efforts to receive

Harriet Lane Johnston Harriet Rebecca Lane Johnston (May 9, 1830 – July 3, 1903) acted as first lady of the United States during the administration of her uncle, lifelong bachelor president James Buchanan, from 1857 to 1861. She has been described as the first o ...

's art collection, which she had bequeathed to the "national art gallery". The collection grew as the Smithsonian buildings grew, and the collection was housed in one or more Smithsonian buildings on the National Mall. In 1920, the National Gallery of Art was separated from the National Museum, becoming its own branch of the Smithsonian, with

William Henry Holmes William Henry Holmes (December 1, 1846 – April 20, 1933), known as W. H. Holmes, was an American explorer, anthropologist, archaeologist, artist, scientific illustrator, cartographer, mountain climber, geologist and museum curator and dire ...

as its first director. By this time, space had become critical: "Collections to the value of several millions of dollars are in storage or temporarily on exhibition and are crowding out important exhibits and producing a congested condition in the

Natural History Natural history is a domain of inquiry involving organisms, including animals, fungi, and plants, in their natural environment, leaning more towards observational than experimental methods of study. A person who studies natural history is cal ...

Industrial Arts Industrial arts is an educational program that features the fabrication of objects in wood or metal using a variety of hand, power, or machine tools. Industrial Arts are commonly referred to as Technology Education. It may include small engine ...

, and Smithsonian Buildings". In 1924, architect Charles A. Platt drew up preliminary plans for a National Gallery of Art to be built on the block next to the Natural History Museum. However, this building was never constructed. In 1937, the National Gallery of Art became the National Collection of Fine Arts (NCFA), because

Andrew Mellon Andrew William Mellon (; March 24, 1855 – August 26, 1937), known also as A. W. Mellon, was an American banker, businessman, industrialist, philanthropist, art collector, and politician. The son of Mellon family patriarch Thomas Mellon ...

insisted that the previous moniker be given to a new institution formed through his donation of a large art collection. By the 1950s, the NCFA still occupied a small space in the Natural History Building. In 1958, Congress finally granted the NCFA a home, the

, which was about to be vacated by the

U.S. Civil Service Commission The United States Civil Service Commission was a government agency of the federal government of the United States. It was created to select employees of federal government on merit rather than relationships. In 1979, it was dissolved as part of ...

. The building would be shared with the planned National Portrait Gallery, with the NCFA occupying the northern half of the building. Renovation work on the building began in 1964. The NCFA opened in its new home on May 6, 1968. The museum's relocation came at an unfortunate time, as the neighborhood had been devastated a month earlier by the Martin Luther King assassination riots. The NCFA struggled to attract visitors over the following decades, as the streets around it remained bleak and lonely. This would remain a factor until the late 1990s, when the work of the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation and the opening of the

MCI Center Capital One Arena is an indoor arena in Washington, D.C. Located in the Chinatown section of the larger Penn Quarter neighborhood, the arena sits atop the Gallery Place rapid transit station of the Washington Metro. The arena was opened on D ...

(now Capital One Arena) across the street from the museum sparked a revitalization of the neighborhood. The NCFA gained a new branch in 1972, opening the

, dedicated to design and crafts, in a historic building near the

White House The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest (Washington, D.C.), NW in Washington, D.C., it has served as the residence of every U.S. president ...

. In 1980, the name was changed to the National Museum of American Art, to better distinguish it from other federal art museums and to emphasize its focus on American artists. From 1982 to 1988, Charles C. Eldredge served as the museum director, followed by the tenures of

Elizabeth Broun Elizabeth "Betsy" Broun (born December 15, 1946, in Kansas City) is an American art historian and curator. Broun served as the Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum from 1989 to 2016, and is the longest-serving ...

and

Stephanie Stebich Stephanie Antoinette Franziska Stebich (born January 26, 1966, in Mülheim) is a German-born American art historian and curator. Early life and education Born in Germany to Gehard and Ute, Stebich's family immigrated to Scarsdale, New York, wh ...

. In January 2000, the museum closed to begin a planned three-year, $60-million renovation of the Patent Office Building. To keep the museum's collection accessible to the public during the closure, many of the artworks were sent out in a "Treasures to Go" series of traveling exhibitions, billed as "the largest museum tour in history". The museum's name was changed to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in October 2000 so that the museum and its traveling exhibitions could benefit from the Smithsonian's brand recognition. After renovations were underway, the plans were broadened in an effort to restore much of the building's original elegance. Many of the building's exceptional architectural features were restored: porticos modeled after the Parthenon in Athens, a curving double staircase, colonnades, vaulted galleries, large windows, and skylights as long as a city block. New features added to the building included the Lunder Conservation Center, the Luce Foundation Center for American Art, Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium, and the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard. Meanwhile, the museum's offices, library, and storage were moved to the nearby Victor Building, freeing up valuable space and allowing the museum to display four times as many artworks as before. The renovation ultimately took six years and $283 million. The museum and the National Portrait Gallery reopened their combined building, renamed as the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, on July 1, 2006.

Affiliated museums

National Portrait Gallery

The Smithsonian American Art Museum shares the historic Old Patent Office building with the

, another Smithsonian museum. Although the two museums' names have not changed, they are collectively known as the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture.

Renwick Gallery

Also under the auspices of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the

is a smaller, historic building on

Pennsylvania Avenue Pennsylvania Avenue is a primarily diagonal street in Washington, D.C. that connects the United States Capitol with the White House and then crosses northwest Washington, D.C. to Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), Georgetown. Traveling through So ...

across the street from the

. The building originally housed the collection of the

. In addition to displaying a large collection of American contemporary craft, several hundred paintings from the museum's permanent collection — hung salon style: one-atop-another and side-by-side — are featured in special installations in the Grand Salon.

Features and programs

Collections

Part of the

, the museum has a broad variety of American art, with more than 7,000 artists represented, that covers all regions and art movements found in the United States. SAAM contains the world's largest collection of

New Deal The New Deal was a series of wide-reaching economic, social, and political reforms enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1938, in response to the Great Depression in the United States, Great Depressi ...

art; a collection of contemporary craft, American impressionist paintings, and masterpieces from the

Gilded Age In History of the United States, United States history, the Gilded Age is the period from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s, which occurred between the Reconstruction era and the Progressive Era. It was named by 1920s historians after Mar ...

; photography, modern folk art, works by

African American African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from an ...

and Latino artists, images of western expansion, and realist art from the first half of the twentieth century. Among the significant artists represented in its collection are

Nam June Paik Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a South Korean artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" ...

Jenny Holzer Jenny Holzer (born July 29, 1950) is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick, New York. Her work focuses on the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projectio ...

David Hockney David Hockney (born 9 July 1937) is an English Painting, painter, Drawing, draughtsman, Printmaking, printmaker, Scenic design, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considere ...

, Richard Hunt,

Georgia O'Keeffe Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 March 6, 1986) was an American Modernism, modernist painter and drafter, draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements. Called the "M ...

Ching Ho Cheng Ching Ho Cheng (December 26, 1946 – May 25, 1989) was a Cuban-born Chinese and American contemporary painter, who lived in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s. His work consists of four distinct periods: Psychedelics, Gouache, Torn Works ...

John Singer Sargent John Singer Sargent (; January 12, 1856 – April 15, 1925) was an American expatriate artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era, Edwardian-era luxury. He created roughly 900 oil ...

Albert Pinkham Ryder Albert Pinkham Ryder (March 19, 1847 – March 28, 1917) was an American painter best known for his poetic and moody allegory, allegorical works and seascapes, as well as his Eccentricity (behavior), eccentric personality. While his art shared an ...

Albert Bierstadt Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902) was a German American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was no ...

, Frances Farrand Dodge,

Edmonia Lewis Mary Edmonia Lewis, also known as "Wildfire" (c. July 4, 1844 – September 17, 1907), was an American sculptor. Born in Upstate New York of mixed African-American and Native American ( Mississauga Ojibwe) heritage, she worked for most of her ...

Thomas Moran Thomas Moran (February 12, 1837 – August 25, 1926) was an American painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School in New York whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains. Moran and his family, wife Mary Nimmo Moran and daughter Ruth, took ...

, James Gill,

Edward Hopper Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was an American realism painter and printmaker. He is one of America's most renowned artists and known for his skill in depicting modern American life and landscapes. Born in Nyack, New York, to a ...

, John William "Uncle Jack" Dey,

Karen LaMonte Karen LaMonte (born December 14, 1967) is an American artist known for her life-size sculptures in ceramic, bronze, marble, and cast glass. Background LaMonte was born and grew up in Manhattan, New York. In 1990, after she graduated from the Rho ...

and

Winslow Homer Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910) was an American landscape painter and illustrator, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters of 19th-century America and a preeminent figure in ...

. SAAM describes itself as being "dedicated to collecting, understanding, and enjoying American art. The museum celebrates the extraordinary creativity of artists whose works reflect the American experience and global connections."

Galleries and public spaces

The American Art's main building contains expanded permanent-collection galleries and public spaces. The museum has two innovative public spaces. The Luce Foundation Center for American Art is a visible art storage and study center, which allows visitors to browse more than 3,300 works of the collection. The Lunder Conservation Center is "the first art conservation facility to allow the public permanent behind-the-scenes views of the preservation work of museums".

The Luce Foundation Center for American Art

Luce Foundation Center for American Art 13

The Luce Foundation Center, which opened in July 2000, is the first visible art storage and study center in Washington, D.C., and the fourth center to bear the Luce Family name. It has 20,400 square feet on the third and fourth floors of American Art Museum. It presents more than 3,300 objects in 64 secure glass cases, which quadruples the number of artworks from the permanent collection on public view. The purpose of open storage is to allow patrons to view various niche art that is usually not part of a main exhibition or gala special. The Luce Foundation Center features paintings densely hung on screens; sculptures; crafts and objects by folk and self-taught artists arranged on shelves. Large-scale sculptures are installed on the first floor. The center has John Gellatly's European collection of decorative arts.

Lunder Conservation Center

The Lunder Conservation Center, which opened in July 2006, is the first

art conservation conservation and restoration of cultural property focuses on protection and care of cultural property (tangible cultural heritage), including artworks, architecture, archaeology, and museum collections. Conservation activities include preve ...

facility that allows the public permanent behind-the-scenes views of preservation work. Conservation staff are visible to the public through floor-to-ceiling glass walls that allow visitors to see firsthand all the techniques which conservators use to examine, treat, and preserve artworks. The Lunder Center has five conservation laboratories and studios equipped to treat paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculptures, folk art objects, contemporary crafts, decorative arts, and frames. The Center uses various specialized and esoteric tools, such as hygrothermographs, to maintain optimal temperature and humidity to preserve works of art. Staff from both the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the

work in the Lunder Center.

Selected exhibitions

The museum has put on hundreds of exhibitions since its founding. Many exhibitions are groundbreaking and promote new scholarship within the field of American art. What follows is a brief list of selected, and more recent, examples: * ''

Ginny Ruffner Ginny Carol Ruffner (née Martin; June 21, 1952 – January 20, 2025) was an American glass artist based in Seattle, Washington. She is known for her use of the lampworking (or flameworking) technique and for her use of borosilicate glass in he ...

: Reforestation of the Imagination'' (2019–2020) * '' Michael Sherrill Retrospective'' (2019–2020) * ''American Myth & Memory:

David Levinthal David Lawrence Levinthal (born March 8, 1949) is an American photographer who lives and works in New York City. He uses small toys and props with dramatic lighting to construct miniature environments for subject matters varying from war scenes to ...

Photographs'' (2019–2019) * ''Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975'' (2019–2019) * ''Disrupting Craft: Renwick Invitational 2018'' (2018–2019) * ''Between Worlds: The Art of

Bill Traylor William Traylor (April 1, – October 23, 1949) was an African-American self-taught artist from Lowndes County, Alabama. Born into slavery, Traylor spent the majority of his life after emancipation as a sharecropper. It was only after 19 ...

'' (2018–2019) * ''

Trevor Paglen Trevor Paglen (born 1974) is an American artist, geographer, and author whose work covers mass surveillance and data collection. In 2016, Paglen won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and he has also won The Cultural Award from the ...

: Sites Unseen'' (2018–2019) * ''

Diane Arbus Diane Arbus (; ; March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971
by

: A box of ten photographs'' (2018–2019) * ''No Spectators: The Art of

Burning Man Burning Man is a week-long large-scale desert event focused on "community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance" held annually in the Western United States. The event's name comes from its ceremony on the penultimate night of the event: the ...

'' (2018–2019) * '' Do Ho Suh: Almost Home'' (2018) * '' Tamayo: The New York Years'' (2017–2018) * ''Murder Is Her Hobby:

Frances Glessner Lee Frances Glessner Lee (March 25, 1878 – January 27, 1962) was an American forensic scientist. She was influential in developing the science of forensics in the United States. To this end, she created the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained De ...

and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death'' (2017–2018) * ''

Kara Walker Kara Elizabeth Walker (born November 26, 1969) is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, printmaker, installation artist, filmmaker, and professor who explores Race (classification of human beings), race, gender, human sexuality, sexual ...

: Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)'' (2017–2018) * ''Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography'' (2017) * '' June Schwarcz: Invention and Variation'' (2017) * '' Gene Davis: Hot Beat'' (2016–2017) * ''

Isamu Noguchi was an American artist, furniture designer and Landscape architecture, landscape architect whose career spanned six decades from the 1920s. Known for his sculpture and public artworks, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Grah ...

, Archaic/Modern'' (2016–2017) * ''Harlem Heroes: Photographs by

Carl Van Vechten Carl Van Vechten (; June 17, 1880December 21, 1964) was an American writer and Fine-art photography, artistic photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary estate, literary executor of Gertrude Stein. He gained fame ...

'' (2016–2017) * ''Visions and Revisions: Renwick Invitational 2016'' (2016) * ''Artworks by African Americans from the Collection'' (2016) * ''The Art of

Romaine Brooks Romaine Brooks (born Beatrice Romaine Goddard; May 1, 1874 – December 7, 1970) was an American painter who worked mostly in Paris and Capri. She specialized in portrait painting, portraiture and used a subdued tonal Palette (painting), palette ...

'' (2016) * '' Ralph Fasanella: Lest We Forget'' (2014) * ''Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection'' (2014) * ''Pop Art Prints'' (2014) * ''Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art'' (2013) * ''Landscapes In Passing: Photographs by Steve Fitch, Robbert Flick, and Elaine Mayes'' (2013) * ''A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum'' (2013) * ''

: Global Visionary'' (2012) * ''The Civil War and American Art'' (2012) * ''40 under 40: Craft Futures'' (2012) * ''African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond'' (2012) * ''

The Art of Video Games ''The Art of Video Games'' was an exhibition by the Smithsonian American Art Museum which was on display from March 16 to September 30, 2012. The exhibition was designed to highlight the evolution of art within the video game medium over its for ...

'' (2012) * ''

Annie Leibovitz Anna-Lou Leibovitz ( ; born October 2, 1949) is an American Portrait photography, portrait photographer best known for her portraits, particularly of celebrities, which often feature subjects in intimate settings and poses. Leibovitz's Polaroid ...

: Pilgrimage'' (2011) * ''Multiplicity'' (2011) * ''The Great American Hall of Wonders'' (2011) * ''Something of Splendor: Decorative Arts from the White House'' (2011) * '' Alexis Rockman – ''A Fable for Tomorrow'''' (2010) * ''

The West As America ''The West as America, Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920'' was an art exhibition organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (then known as the National Museum of American Art, or NMAA) in Washington, D.C. in 1991, featuring ...

'' (1991) * '' Sandra C. Fernández: The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics''

Outreach

The museum has maintained a traveling exhibition program since 1951. During the 2000s renovation, a "series of exhibitions of more than 1,000 major artworks from American Art's permanent collection traveled to 105 venues across the United States," which were "seen by more than 2.5 million visitors". Since 2006, thirteen exhibitions have toured to more than 30 cities. SAAM provides electronic resources to schools and the public as part of education programs. An example is ''Artful Connections'', which gives real-time video conference tours of American Art. In addition, the museum offers the Summer Institutes: Teaching the Humanities through Art, week-long professional development workshops that introduce educators to methods for incorporating American art and technology into their humanities curricula. American Art has seven online research databases, which has more than 500,000 records of artworks in public and private collections worldwide, including the Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture. Numerous researchers and millions of virtual visitors per year use these databases. Also, American Art and

Heritage Preservation Heritage Preservation (active 1973–2014) was an American non-profit organization. Its mission was to preserve the nation's heritage for future generations through innovative leadership, education, and programs. As of June 30, 2015 the organi ...

work together in a joint project, Save Outdoor Sculpture, "dedicated to the documentation and preservation of outdoor sculpture". The museum produces a peer-reviewed periodical, ''American Art'' (started in 1987), for new scholarship. Since 1993, American Art has been had an online presence. It has one of the earliest museum websites when, in 1995, it launched its own website. EyeLevel, the first blog at the Smithsonian Institution, was started in 2005 and, as of 2013, the blog "has approximately 12,000 readers each month".

In popular culture

In 2006, fashion designer

Isaac Mizrahi Isaac Mizrahi (born October 14, 1961) is an American fashion designer, actor, singer, television presenter and chief designer of the Isaac Mizrahi brand for Xcel Brands. Based in New York City, he is best known for his eponymous fashion lines. M ...

designed the conservators' denim work aprons. In 2008, the American Art Museum hosted an

alternate reality game An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions. The form is defined by int ...

, called ''Ghosts of a Chance'', which was created by City Mystery. The game allowed patrons "a new way of engaging with the collection" in the Luce Foundation Center. The game ran for six weeks and attracted more than 6,000 participants.

References

External links

*
Luce Foundation Center
at SAAM
Lunder Conservation Center
at SAAM *
Virtual tour of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
provided by

Google Arts & Culture Google Arts & Culture (formerly Google Art Project) is an online platform of high-resolution images and videos of artworks and cultural artifacts from partner cultural organizations throughout the world, operated by Google. It utilizes high-re ...

* {{Authority control 1829 establishments in Washington, D.C. Art museums and galleries established in 1829 Art museums and galleries in Washington, D.C. Members of the Cultural Alliance of Greater Washington Museums of American art Penn Quarter American Art Museum Chinatown (Washington, D.C.)