Evergreen: Art from the Collection celebrates SJMA’s collection as both a gift to and a product of its community. This dedicated gallery space, which provides long-term access to the Museum’s collection, honors the community members who rallied together to establish the Museum; the artists who trust us to care for their visions; the generous donors who […]

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has the largest public collection of works by Alma Thomas in the world. Thomas’s art first entered SAAM’s collection in 1970. The museum acquired more than a dozen works during the artist’s lifetime, and thirteen that were bequeathed to the museum by Thomas after her death. Composing Color: Paintings by […]

Frye Salon features over one-hundred paintings from the Frye Art Museum’s Founding Collection hung floor to ceiling—a display mode referred to as a salon-style hang. The installation approximates the dramatic viewing experience enjoyed by visitors to Charles and Emma Frye’s Seattle home in the first decades of the twentieth century. The Fryes developed their passion for […]

Sir Isaac Julien’s moving image installation Lessons of the Hour (2019) interweaves period reenactments across five screens to create a vivid picture of nineteenth-century activist, writer, orator, and philosopher Frederick Douglass. Through critical research, fictional reconstruction, and a marriage of poetic image and sound, Julien asserts Douglass’ enduring lessons of justice, abolition, and freedom that […]

Jack Earl, one of the first Arts/Industry artists-in-residence, said the Arts/Industry residency in the Kohler Co. factory felt like a “mad dash at something.” Mad Dash: 50 Years of Arts/Industry is a chronological installation of artworks, letters, photographs, and promotional materials dating from 1974 to the present. It reveals the origin and history of Arts/Industry through […]