Art + Artists
Featured Exhibitions
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Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture
March 20, 2020 — August 16, 2020
Smithsonian American Art Museum (8th and F Streets, NW)This exhibition reveals how the influential naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) shaped American perceptions of nature and the way American cultural identity became grounded in our relationship with the environment.
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Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists
February 21, 2020 – May 17, 2020
Renwick Gallery (Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street NW)Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists is the first major thematic exhibition to explore the artistic achievements of Native women.
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Chiura Obata: American Modern
November 27, 2019 – May 25, 2020
Smithsonian American Art Museum (8th and F Streets, NW)Japanese-born artist Chiura Obata’s seemingly effortless synthesis of different art traditions defies the usual division between “East” and “West.” This exhibition presents the most comprehensive survey of his rich and varied body of work to date, from bold California landscape paintings to intimate drawings of his experiences of the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Collection Highlights
The museum’s collection begins with works from the colonies of New Spain and New England.
The museum’s collection charts the nation’s growth from a young republic to an emerging world power. Landscapes extolling the nation’s geographic wonders from Niagara Falls to the Grand Canyon drove and documented westward expansion. Asher Durand’s Dover Plains, Dutchess County, New York presents an idyllic landscape where man and nature coexist.
Artists in the twentieth century chose two distinct ways to depict modernism and the excitement of progress—realism and abstraction. Both are well represented in the collection. The museum has the largest collection of New Deal art and murals in the country. Images of jazz and street life, farms and factories, workers and families captured a changing America
In recent years, the museum has strengthened its commitment to contemporary art through acquisitions, commissions, and exhibitions.
SAAM is home to one of the most significant collections of African American art in the world, with more than 2,000 works by more than 200 African American artists. These artworks span four centuries of creative expression in various media, including painting, sculpture, textiles, and photography.
The museum’s collection of contemporary American craft is considered one of the finest in the United States.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection of folk and self-taught art represents the powerful vision of America’s untrained and vernacular artists. Represented in the museum’s collection are pieces that draw on tradition and artworks that reveal a more personal vision.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s pioneering Latinx art collection represents a profound commitment to building a great national collection reflecting the rich contributions of Latinos to our country from the colonial period to the present.
America’s continuing love affair with the camera can be traced through the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection, which ranges from early daguerreotypes to contemporary digital works. In 1983, the museum began to seriously collect photography. That year, more than 1,800 photographs were transferred to the museum from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The museum’s American sculpture collection is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world.
Graphic arts comprise a large part of the museum’s collection, which reveals the central importance of works on paper for American artists, both as studies for creations in other media and as finished works of art.
The Time-Based Media Art Initiative at the Smithsonian American Art Museum reflects a commitment to develop the museum’s time-based media collections, research resources, and programs.
