Search SAAM Stories
Find behind-the-scenes museum stories about artworks, artists, and more.
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An item that most people carry in their pockets is key to experiencing Hank Willis Thomas's Pledge.
SAAM
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The contemporary artist creates works that address the Filipinx American experience
Krystle Stricklin
NEA Curatorial Fellow
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A look at historic new acquisitions of art by two trailblazing Japanese American painters
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Melissa Ho
Curator (20th-Century Art)

Go in-depth for a look at the themes of Sharing Honors and Burdens at the Renwick Gallery
Lara Evans
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Curator Mary Savig details an artist’s journey to create the powerful performance work Metabolizing the Border that explores the physical and psychological experiences migrants face while crossing the borderlands.
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Mary Savig
Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft
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The lives of Loïs Mailou Jones and Elizabeth Catlett intersected briefly but formatively in the 1930s at Howard University
SAAM
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Craftsman David “Dave” Drake, enslaved for most of his life, produced uncommonly large ceramic jars in 19th-century South Carolina adorned by his poetic verses
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Jill Vaum Rothschild
Luce Curatorial Fellow
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Leslie Umberger
Curator (Folk and Self-Taught Art)
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Andrew Clemens invented, then perfected, the art of the sand bottle in the late nineteenth century.
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Leslie Umberger
Curator (Folk and Self-Taught Art)
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Jill Vaum Rothschild
Luce Curatorial Fellow
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SAAM’s video series, American Art Moments, takes a closer look at the monumental quilt The Harlem Hellfighters by Bisa Butler
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Howard Kaplan
Writer
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Multimedia artist Sharon Kerry-Harlan pieces together portraits of contemporary Black American life using materials and symbols from the past and present
SAAM

In his all too short career, the photographer rejected conventional codes of identity and insisted on new, ambiguous conditions of being.
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Melissa Ho
Curator (20th-Century Art)
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Learn more about artist Bisa Butler's vivid portraits of African American heroes from World War I
SAAM
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On the multimedia installation, Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me, recently acquired by SAAM
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Saisha Grayson
Curator of Time-Based Media