Smithsonian American Art Museum

• 1. Introduction

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  The Smithsonian American Art Museum sits inside one of Washington's grandest buildings, a structure whose porticos were modeled after the Parthenon in Athens. More than 7,000 artists are represented in its holdings, making it one of the most expansive collections of art made in the United States anywhere in the world. But the museum's path to that distinction was far from straightforward. It survived a catastrophic fire. It spent decades without a proper home. It reopened into a neighborhood still raw from riots. And for much of its existence, it was known by a completely different name. How did a collection that Congress mandated in 1846 become what it is today? That is the thread this documentary follows.

• 2. A Gallery Deferred

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  When Congress created the Smithsonian Institution in 1846, it wrote a gallery of art directly into the founding act. The directive was clear on paper. In practice, Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry had little interest in art, preferring to channel resources into scientific research. The collection sat in the original Smithsonian Building, later known as the Castle, largely neglected. Then, in 1865, fire swept through and destroyed much of what had been gathered. The artworks that survived were scattered outward, loaned to the Library of Congress and to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, where they stayed for decades. Only in 1896, after Congress funded a fireproof room, did the works return to the Smithsonian's care. That return set the stage for a slow, contested effort to build something more permanent.

• 3. The Name Problem

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  By 1906, the Smithsonian had begun calling its art holdings the National Gallery of Art, partly in hopes of receiving Harriet Lane Johnston's bequest, which she had left to the "national art gallery". The name stuck for three decades. Then in 1937, the collector and financier Andrew Mellon insisted the National Gallery of Art name be given to a new institution he was funding with a large personal donation. The Smithsonian's collection was quietly renamed the National Collection of Fine Arts. By the 1950s, that collection still occupied a cramped corner of the Natural History Building. In 1980, administrators changed the name again, to the National Museum of American Art, to sharpen the institution's identity against other federal museums. The name finally stabilized in October 2000, when it became the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a change timed to let the traveling exhibitions it sent across the country benefit from the Smithsonian brand.

• 4. The Patent Office Years

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  In 1958, Congress granted the collection a real home: the Old Patent Office Building, which the U.S. Civil Service Commission was preparing to vacate. The northern half would belong to what was then the National Collection of Fine Arts; the southern half was set aside for the planned National Portrait Gallery. Renovation work began in 1964, and the museum opened there on the 6th of May, 1968. The timing proved painful. Just weeks earlier, the neighborhood had been shaken by the riots that followed Martin Luther King's assassination. The streets around the museum stayed largely deserted for the following decades, and visitor numbers suffered for it. The situation did not shift until the late 1990s, when the work of the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation and the opening of the MCI Center, now called Capital One Arena, directly across the street began drawing people back to the area.

• 5. The Sixty-Million Dollar Gamble

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  In January 2000, the museum shut its doors for what was planned as a three-year, $60-million renovation. To keep the collection accessible during the closure, more than 1,000 major artworks were sent on a "Treasures to Go" series of traveling exhibitions, described at the time as "the largest museum tour in history". The exhibitions reached 105 venues across the United States and were seen by more than 2.5 million visitors. Once renovations were underway, the scope grew considerably. Architects restored the building's porticos, a curving double staircase, colonnades, vaulted galleries, and skylights as long as a city block. New additions included the Luce Foundation Center for American Art, the Lunder Conservation Center, the Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium, and the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard. Museum offices, the library, and storage moved to the nearby Victor Building, freeing enough space to display four times as many artworks as before. When the work was finished, it had taken six years and cost $283 million. The combined building, now shared with the National Portrait Gallery, reopened on the 1st of July, 2006, under the name the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture.

• 6. What the Walls Hold

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  SAAM holds the world's largest collection of New Deal art, a fact that reflects how deliberately the institution built around specific chapters of American history. The collection spans photography, jewelry, modern folk art, American impressionist paintings, Gilded Age masterpieces, works by African American and Latino artists, images of western expansion, and realist painting from the first half of the twentieth century. Among the artists represented are Nam June Paik, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Singer Sargent, Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, Edmonia Lewis, Albert Bierstadt, and Jenny Holzer. The Luce Foundation Center, which opened in July 2000 in 20,400 square feet across the building's third and fourth floors, places more than 3,300 objects in 64 secure glass cases, letting visitors browse works that would otherwise remain in storage. The center's explicitly stated purpose is to make niche art available to patrons outside the main exhibition cycle, and it houses John Gellatly's European collection of decorative arts alongside paintings, sculptures, and works by folk and self-taught artists.

• 7. Conservation in Public View

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  The Lunder Conservation Center, which opened in July 2006, built on a premise unusual in museum practice: conservation work should be visible to the public, not hidden behind closed doors. Floor-to-ceiling glass walls allow visitors to watch conservators as they examine, treat, and preserve artworks. The center has five laboratories and studios equipped to handle paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculptures, folk art, contemporary crafts, decorative arts, and frames. Specialized instruments, including hygrothermographs that monitor temperature and humidity, maintain the precise environmental conditions artworks require. Staff from both SAAM and the National Portrait Gallery share the facility. In 2006, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi designed the conservators' denim work aprons, a detail that captures the museum's interest in keeping the work of preservation visually legible and, occasionally, unexpectedly stylish.

• 8. Reach Beyond the Building

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  The museum has maintained a traveling exhibition program since 1951. Seven online research databases hold more than 500,000 records of artworks in public and private collections worldwide, including the Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture, which document more than 400,000 individual artworks. The museum launched its own website in 1995, one of the earliest museum sites online, and started EyeLevel, the first blog at the Smithsonian Institution, in 2005. As of 2013, that blog drew approximately 12,000 readers each month. In 2008, the museum hosted an alternate reality game called Ghosts of a Chance, created by City Mystery, which gave visitors a new way of moving through the Luce Foundation Center; the game ran for six weeks and pulled in more than 6,000 participants. In 2022, the museum welcomed 1,100,000 visitors, ranking it seventh on the list of most-visited museums in the United States.