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School Tours
Field Trips: Eye Opener Visits and Self-Guided Tours
Smithsonian American Art Museum Docent Marilyn Reis takes eighth grade American history students through the galleries.
Introduce your students to the nation's art treasures in person! Whatever your curricular goals, the Education Office can work with you to ensure a productive visit. The Smithsonian American Art Museum's collection spans more than three centuries and tells stories of the United States and its people. Plan a docent-led tour, called an Eye Opener Visit, or a self-guided tour using the information below.
Eye Opener Visits
Knowledgeable docents lead Eye Opener Visits—tours that use the Smithsonian American Art Museum's paintings and sculpture, prints and photographs, and craft and decorative arts as primary resources. By focusing on a few key artworks, we help integrate your visit with students' core classwork and standards of learning. Docents use teaching techniques of inquiry, guided looking, comparison, and hands-on learning. Pre-and post-visit materials are available. Please select the theme that best complements your classwork.
- Selected Eye Opener Themes
- Optional Activities
- School/Group Registration Form
- Planning Your Museum Visit
Selected Eye Opener Themes
Young America
Students trace the transformation of the thirteen colonies into an independent nation. A combination of portraits, landscapes, genre paintings, furniture, and sculpture tells the story of growing national ambitions, territorial expansion, and the beginning of industry.
Lure of the West
Students consider changes in land ownership, the effects of westward expansion, and the belief in America's manifest destiny. How do painters and photographers record these issues for different audiences? How did Americans' view of their place in the world begin to change?
A House Divided
The Civil War tested and consumed the country for more than four years. Many families were touched by death. Students consider "the house" of Lincoln's "House Divided" speech. How did new technologies of printing, engraving, and photography portray the country and the war? What do paintings and sculpture reveal of life during Reconstruction?
Urbanized America
The era between the end of the Civil War and World War I calls to mind conflicting adjectives—elegant, sophisticated, reformist, and ruthless, corrupt, vulgar. The urban population grew more than 700 percent. What can students learn about the period from its artworks? How did a new generation of politically conscious artists capture the city's characters and daily events? How did new industrialists, new fortunes, and new access to foreign travel produce fresh avenues for America's artists?
Free within Ourselves: African American Artists
The works of African American artists whose contributions have made a significant and dynamic impact on America are highlighted during this tour. The individual lives of the artists, and the creative spirit that motivated each of them, are discussed—providing insight into the historical, social, and cultural context of African-American artists.
Reshaping American Life
Students examine the 1930s in light of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which helped provide work for artists during the Great Depression. What messages did the government hope to disseminate through works of art in public places? What does propaganda look like today?
We the People
Throughout our history, Americans have struggled for freedoms—legal, personal, and political. Students compare and contrast artworks to discuss civic ideals and realities.
New Voices, New Visions
In the late twentieth century, technology, globalism, and diversity merged on the international superhighway. What are today's national concerns? Who are today's new Americans? Who are the new artists and what are they saying about America?
Folk Art: Beyond the Everyday
From beads to bottle caps, foil to fabric, students will explore the diversity of media and experiences in American folk art! This tour covers the main elements of folk art: self-taught artists, everyday materials, vision and imagination, storytelling and sense of place.
Latino Art and Culture
Artistic achievements of Hispanic Americans from the 1860s to the present represent the diversity of the Latino community and reflect historical and cultural developments that have transformed American art.
Native Americans
Viewers can detect shifting attitudes toward American Indians in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works by non-native artists. Participants also examine twentieth-century Native American artists whose works express their cultural heritage and concerns.
From Sea to Shining Sea: American Landscapes
What do a painter's brush and a photographer's lens reveal about our interaction with the land? With active looking and movement, young students will focus on environment and communities. Older students will question how land ownership shapes our national politics.
To See Is to Think: Visual Literacy
How can an artwork be a primary resource? Why do people make art? What can we learn by looking closely? Through dialogue and gallery games students decode artworks to find hidden messages, gain critical-thinking skills, and build self-confidence to read visual materials. Media, techniques, and vocabulary are introduced.
Neighborhood and Nation
Young students compare and contrast their own neighborhoods, homes, schools, and families with those of children from early times through today. Paintings, photographs, and sculpture are used and classroom vocabulary, verbs, and adjectives are emphasized.
The Renwick Gallery
The Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery collects, interprets, and exhibits the finest American craft and decorative arts. The Renwick's Grand Salon features a selection of landscapes, portraits, and allegorical works by fifty-one American artists from the 1840s to the 1930s.
Renwick Eye Opener Visits
Students from schools all over the country get a first hand look at American art through Eye-Opener tours.
Contemporary Craft
Explore the world of crafts using your senses! Students explore and handle contemporary craft objects that demonstrate process, material, structure and technique. Students apply that experience to interpret one-of-a-kind craft objects.
Optional Activities
Students learn in the galleries using the Art à la Cart program.
Support your Eye Opener Visit with optional activities that emphasize experiential learning. Consult with the Smithsonian American Art Museum's education department tour scheduler when you book a tour to determine if the following activities are offered for your visit.
Learning Lab and Art à la Cart
In our Learning Lab and through the Art à la Cart program, students extend their gallery visits by exploring primary resources, hands-on activities, animated gallery games, and directed writing exercises.
Luce Foundation Center
The Luce Foundation Center for American Art is a visible storage facility that displays around 3,400 objects from the Museum's collection in glass cases and drawers. Students can explore the aisles, look up objects on the interactive kiosks, or even create a virtual collection that they can access from home.
Lunder Conservation Center
In the Lunder Conservation Center, students observe artwork being preserved. This is the first art conservation facility that allows the public permanent behind-the-scenes access to the preservation work of the museum.
Planning Your Museum Visit
As you plan your field trip, allow sixty minutes for Eye Opener Visits for students in grades 4 through 12 and those in college. Students in grades K–3 tour for thirty minutes. We welcome learners of all styles and abilities, from all settings. To add an Optional Activity, allow an additional thirty minutes. To visit our museum store, build in additional time.
Self-Guided Tours
With a self-guided visit, you are free to explore the collection in a way that best suits your class. In general, for students in kindergarten through second grade, we suggest that you concentrate on a few objects. For older students, we recommend one hour of focused looking and thirty minutes of discussion about the artworks. Teachers are invited to consult with the Smithsonian American Art Museum staff regarding content for self-guided tours. Contact us via telephone at (202) 633-8531 or email AmericanArtMuseumTours(at)si.edu. You can also submit your questions using our School/Group Registration Form.
Reservations
Eye Opener Visits require reservations. Please book at least one month in advance. When selecting a date, please identify back-up dates in case your first choice is unavailable. One week before your visit, your lead docent will contact you to discuss your content and curriculum connections. To make a reservation, complete and submit the School/Group Registration Form.
Self-guided tours do not require reservations, though they must comply with our policies and guidelines below.
Educators and Chaperones
Both guided and self-guided school groups require the following chaperone-to-student ratios:
- Grades 1–2: 1 adult per 5 students
- Grades 3–6: 1 adult per 10 students
- Grades 7–12: 1 adult per 15 students
Chaperones must accompany all school and home school groups at all times. Teachers and chaperones are responsible for their students' behavior. We encourage accompanying adults to support the teacher's goals for the museum visit and to model active listening.
Guidelines for Museum Behavior
Please review the following guidelines with your students and chaperones before visiting the museum. Failure to comply may result in your group being asked to leave the building.
- Be considerate of other visitors at all times
- Keep at least an arm's length from artwork, pedestals, and exhibition cases
- Walk—don't run—in the halls and stairways
- Use an "inside voice"
- Students may eat their lunches in the Courtyard
- Photography without flash or tripod is permitted, except where posted
Security Policies
Security checks may be required for all visitors, and bags are thoroughly searched. We recommend that groups leave bags on the bus or at school. Pocketknives, scissors, and other sharp implements are not permitted in the museum. To speed entry into the Museum, carry as little as possible.
Closing Policies
The Smithsonian Institution follows the Homeland Security Advisory System. Under the orange advisory level, the museum will remain open. Under the red advisory level, the museum will close.
All our school visits are canceled when any nearby school district is closed or delayed in opening (i.e., District of Columbia, counties of Montgomery, Fairfax, Prince George's, and Arlington, and cities of Falls Church and Alexandria). Prince William, Anne Arundel, and Howard are considered outlying districts and do not affect our policy.
