The Smithsonian American Art Museum, the nation's first collection of American art, is an unparalleled record of the American experience. The collection captures the aspirations, character and imagination of the American people throughout three centuries. The museum is the home to one of the largest and most inclusive collectionsof American art in the world. Its artworks reveal key aspects of America's rich artistic and cultural history from the colonial period to today. 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, Roy Lichtenstein, Nam June Paik, Martin Puryear, and Robert Rauschenberg.
The museum has been a leader in identifying and collecting significant aspects of American visual culture. American Art 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 photography, modern folk art, work by African American and Latino artists, images of western expansion, and realist art from the first half of the twentieth century. In recent years, the museum has focused on strengthening our contemporary art collection, and in particular media arts, through acquisitions and by commissioning new artworks.
The museum's main building, a National Historic Landmark located in the heart of Washington's downtown cultural district, has been meticulously renovated with expanded permanent-collection galleries and innovative public spaces. The Luce Foundation Center for American Art, the first visible art storage and study center in Washington, allows visitors to browse more than 3,300 works from the collection. It adjoins the Lunder Conservation Center, which is shared with the National Portrait Gallery, the first art conservation facility to allow the public permanent behind-the-scenes views of the preservation work of museums.
National Outreach
In addition to a robust exhibition program in Washington, D.C., the museum maintains a highly regarded traveling exhibition program. It has circulated hundreds of exhibitions since the program was established in 1951. During the renovation of the museum's main building, staff organized a series of 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. Since 2006, the museum has toured an additional 13 exhibitions to more than 30 cities. We currently have several major exhibitions touring the United States.
The museum is a leader in providing electronic resources to schools and the public through its national education program. We offer an 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. The museum offers several professional development programs for educators, including The Clarice Smith National Teacher Institutes in which interdisciplinary teams learn to integrate art across the curriculum using Web 2.0 applications, such as podcasts, wikis, and blogs.
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, thousands of researchers contact the museum directly for assistance, and millions of virtual visitors from across the globe use the database resources available online. Save Outdoor Sculpture, a joint project between the museum and Heritage Preservation, is dedicated to the documentation and preservation of outdoor sculpture. We also produce American Art, a peer-reviewed periodical for new scholarship.
American Art has been engaging audiences online since 1993 when we launched one of the earliest museum websites through America Online; our stand-alone site, AmericanArt.si.edu, was launched in 1995. The museum now uses an array of social media sites to connect with online communities. Our Lunder Conservation Center uses Twitter to alert interested followers to conservation treatments in real time. In 2005, the museum debuted EyeLevel, the first blog at the Smithsonian, which has approximately 8,000 readers each month. American Art staff produce a series of three podcasts, also available through iTunes, which feature voices of artists, curators, museum staff, visiting lecturers andstudents. Through email notifications we provide updates on upcoming exhibitions, exciting programs, and behind-the-scenes looks at the museum.
History of the Museum Collection
Introduction
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is dedicated to the art and artists of the United States. All regions, cultures, and traditions in this country are represented in the museum's collections, research resources, exhibitions, and public programs. Colonial portraiture, nineteenth-century landscape, American impressionism, twentieth-century realism and abstraction, New Deal projects, sculpture, photography, prints and drawings, contemporary crafts, African American art, Latino art, and folk art are featured in the collection. More than 7,000 American artists are represented, including major artists such as John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Rauschenberg, Nam June Paik, and Martin Puryear.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum, begun in 1829, is the first federal art collection. The museum began with gifts from private collections and art organizations established in the nation's capital before the founding of the Smithsonian in 1846. The museum has grown steadily to become a center for the study, enjoyment, and preservation of America's cultural heritage. Today the collection consists of artworks in all media, spanning more than 300 years of artistic achievement.
History of the Collection
The collection began modestly in 1829 when a Washingtonian named John Varden set out to form a permanent museum for the nation with his collection of European art. At first, the art was placed in a room he added to his own house near the U.S. Capitol.
In 1841, Varden's collection was displayed in the newly constructed Patent Office Building—coincidentally, the museum's home today. Along with Varden's works came Varden himself as "curator" of the newly created "National Institute" for government-owned artistic and historic items. Paintings and sculptures shared exhibit space with the Declaration of Independence and Benjamin Franklin's printing press.
The establishment of the Smithsonian in 1846 eclipsed the prestige of the institute, which later disbanded. By 1858, many items in the Smithsonian Art Collection on view at the Patent Office Building were moved a few blocks to the newly completed Smithsonian Castle. The remainder of the collection followed in 1862. But a destructive fire there in 1865 increased the Smithsonian's reluctance to build cultural collections. For the rest of the century, most of the artwork was placed on loan to the Library of Congress and to the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
A Turning Point
A turning point in the history of the collection came in 1906. That year the probated will of Harriet Lane Johnston, an art collector and niece of President James Buchanan, forced an important decision in a federal court: the recognition that the Smithsonian's collection formed a "National Gallery of Art."
Coined during a national art-collecting boom, the official name soon attracted major gifts. Highly prized were diverse artworks owned by John Gellatly and American impressionist paintings and Barbizon landscapes collected by William T. Evans.
A Permanent Home
Plans to build a permanent home for the museum on the National Mall came and went, among them a prize-winning modernist structure that shocked federal officials. The competition had been organized after Andrew Mellon gave his European-focused art collection to the nation in 1937 with the stipulation that his new museum be called the "National Gallery of Art" in emulation of the National Gallery of Art in London.
To comply with Mellon's wishes for a National Gallery of Art to house his European collection, the Smithsonian museum known as the National Gallery of Art for thirty-one years was renamed the National Collection of Fine Arts in 1937. It was given a new mission based on New Deal idealism: to promote the work of living artists and to build a national audience.
The interest in historic preservation after World War II ultimately was responsible for giving the first Smithsonian art museum a new home—and preserving an architectural treasure. In 1957, a bill was introduced in Congress to tear down the elegant Patent Office Building to make way for a parking lot. Deteriorated but still one of the purest examples of Greek Revival architecture in the nation, the structure was saved when Congress turned the building over to the Smithsonian. In 1968, after an extensive interior renovation, the museum opened to the public. To learn more about the history of the building, visit the online exhibition for Temple of Invention: History of a National Landmark.
In 1972, the Renwick Gallery opened to the public as a branch museum featuring American crafts.
In 1980, the museum's name was changed to the National Museum of American Art as part of a Smithsonian initiative to standardize the names of its many museums and to reflect the national scope of the collections. Since then, the museum has focused its energy on acquiring and promoting the work of artists in the United States exclusively. Twenty years later, the museum proposed that it be called the Smithsonian American Art Museum as an easy-to-remember name and a straightforward presentation of its mission. Congress approved this change in October 2000.
