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About the American Art Museum
and the Renwick Gallery
Smithsonian American Art Museum
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 American Art Museum is the home to one of the largest and most inclusive collections of 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, Nam June Paik, Martin Puryear, and Robert Rauschenberg.
The Museum has been a leader in identifying significant aspects of American visual culture and actively collecting and exhibiting works of art before many other major public collections. 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 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. In recent years, the Museum has focused on strengthening its contemporary art collection through acquisitions and by commissioning new artworks.
A recent renovation of the Museum's historic main building expanded the permanent collection galleries and created innovative new 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. From 2000 to 2005, museum staff have 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 Art Museum provides 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 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. Save Outdoor Sculpture, a joint project between the Museum and Heritage Preservation, is dedicated to the documentation and preservation of outdoor sculpture. Ask Joan of Art, the Museum’s online reference service, began in 1993 and is the longest running arts-based service of its kind in the United States.
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.
The museum's modern and contemporary art collection is on display in the historic Lincoln Gallery.
Photo Credit: Ken Rahaim, Smithsonian Institution
