Art + Artists
Featured Exhibitions
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This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World
May 13, 2022 — April 2, 2023
Renwick Gallery (Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street NW)This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World showcases the dynamic landscape of American craft today. The exhibition highlights the role that artists play in our world to spark essential conversations, stories of resilience, and methods of activism—showing us a more relational and empathetic world. It centers more expansive definitions and acknowledgments of often-overlooked histories and contributions of women, people of color, and other marginalized communities.
Browse Artworks by Color
Today's Birthday
Explore the Artist Comics
Illustrated by Shayna Cohen
A vividly colored cover with a patchwork of purple, yellow, pink, tan, and blue geometric and floral designs. Artist Mickalene Thomas, a black woman wearing glasses with her hair in dreads tied up in a bun, is seated in a chair with wheels in the center. The artist has her left arm resting on her forehead as she leans backward in a relaxed position. The background is full of many different patch work patterns in a variety of colors with various floral patterns and textures represented. Text at the top of the page reads “Mickalene Thomas: Portrait”
Portrait: A Comic About Mickalene Thomas
When contemporary artist Mickalene Thomas was in art school, she couldn’t afford traditional materials and gravitated towards craft stores and the glitter and rhinestones within. Her paintings speak to female empowerment and of women of color owning and defining their own spaces.
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 works by African American artists in the world with a long-standing commitment to Black artists and the acquisition, preservation, and display of their work. The collection spans three 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 leading 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 and the diversity of Latino communities in the United States.
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.
SAAM’s collection includes many remarkable artworks that reflect the profound and longstanding contributions of Asian American and Asian diasporic artists in the United States. The study of this art contributes to a fuller understanding of the diverse people and influences that have shaped our national culture and raises important questions about what is meant by “American art.”