The Smithsonian American Art Museum

The nation’s first collection of American art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum is an unparalleled record of the American experience. Three centuries of the American people’s aspirations, character and imagination are captured in one of the largest and most inclusive collections of American art in the world. Key aspects of America’s rich artistic and cultural history from the colonial period to today are revealed.

More than 7,000 artists are represented in the collection, including major masters, such as John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Jacob Lawrence, Helen Frankenthaler, Christo, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Lee Friedlander, Nam June Paik, Martin Puryear, and Robert Rauschenberg.

A leader in identifying significant aspects of American visual culture, the Museum has the largest collection of New Deal art and the finest collections of contemporary craft, American impressionist paintings, and masterpieces from the Gilded Age. Other pioneering collections include historic and contemporary folk art, work by African American and Latino artists, photography from its origins in the nineteenth century to contemporary works, images of western expansion, and realist art from the first half of the twentieth century.

A leader in national outreach, the Museum maintains a highly regarded traveling exhibition program that was established in 1951. From 2000 to 2005, museum staff organized 14 exhibitions of more than 1,000 major artworks from American Art’s permanent collection that traveled to 105 venues across the United States. More than 2.5 million visitors saw these exhibitions. The Museum has three major exhibitions touring the U.S. in 2009.

The American Museum offers array of interactive activities online featuring rich media assets that can easily be used by anyone, as well as Artful Connections, real-time video conference tours to classrooms. Museum staff maintain 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. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers contact the Museum directly for assistance, and nearly 3 million virtual visitors from across the globe use the database resources available online.

American Art staff produce a series of podcasts, also available through iTunes, which feature voices of artists, curators, and students. In 2005, the Museum debuted Eye Level, the first blog at the Smithsonian, which has more than 7,000 readers each month. In 2008, American Art was the first museum in the world to host an alternate reality game, Ghosts of a Chance, which offered a new way of engaging with the collection in its Luce Foundation Center.

photo: Kogod Courtyard by M.V. Janzten

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