Past Exhibitions | Smithsonian Institution

Oribe Ware: Color and Pattern Come to Japanese Ceramics

This exhibition highlights the best selections of Oribe ware in the Freer's collection, including two new acquisitions on view for the first time.

December 13, 2014 – June 14, 2015

Asian Art Museum, West Building

Outside the Spacecraft: 50 Years of Extra-Vehicular Activity

This exhibition presents art, photography, artifacts, and personal accounts that relate the continuing story of EVA.

January 8, 2015 – June 8, 2015

Air and Space Museum

Perspectives: Chiharu Shiota

Haunted by the traces that the human body leaves behind, the work amasses personal memories of lost individuals and past moments through an accumulation of discarded shoes and notes collected by the artist.

August 30, 2014 – June 7, 2015

Asian Art Museum, East Building

Unearthing Arabia: The Archaeological Adventures of Wendell Phillips

The exhibition highlights Phillips’s key expedition finds, recreates his adventures (and misadventures), and conveys the thrill of discovery on the last great archaeological frontier.

October 11, 2014 – June 7, 2015

Asian Art Museum, East Building

Maira Kalman Selects

56 objects from the collections of Cooper Hewitt, other Smithsonian museums, and Kalman herself, arranged by the acclaimed author, artist, and designer to suggest the journey of a life story, from birth through death.

December 12, 2014 – June 7, 2015

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

The Traveler's Eye: Scenes of Asia

The exhibition provides glimpses of travels across the continent, from pilgrimages and research trips to expeditions for trade and tourism.

November 22, 2014 – May 31, 2015

Asian Art Museum, East Building

Style in Chinese Landscape Painting: The Yuan Dynasty Legacy

This exhibition includes the earliest work in the museum collection together with later examples tracing the characteristics and evolution of six key styles.

November 22, 2014 – May 31, 2015

Asian Art Museum, West Building

Tools: Extending Our Reach

Can tools be functional and have great design? This exhibition examines the role and significance of tools that span world cultures and histories.

December 12, 2014 – May 25, 2015

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Mr. Lincoln's Washington: A Civil War Portfolio

Photographs, prints, drawings, and maps reveal how the Civil War affected life in the District of Columbia.

December 13, 2013 – May 25, 2015

Portrait Gallery

Lincoln's Carriage

A special display of the carriage that transported the President, Mary Todd Lincoln, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris to Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865.

March 23, 2015 – May 25, 2015

American History Museum

One Life: Grant and Lee: "It is well that war is so terrible..."

Paintings, photographs, documents, and objects reveal the personal lives and professional rivalries of Union General Ulysses S. Grant and Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

July 4, 2014 – May 25, 2015

Portrait Gallery

Nasta'liq: The Genius of Persian Calligraphy

More than 20 works focus on nasta'liq, a calligraphic script that developed in the 14th century in Iran and remains one of the most expressive forms of aesthetic refinement in Persian culture to this day.

September 13, 2014 – May 3, 2015

Asian Art Museum, East Building

Artists at Work

This juried show, the Smithsonian Community Committees’s fourth, pan-Institutional art exhibition, underscores the often hidden talents within the Smithsonian community. A panel of three outside jurors selected 56 artists, from 23 different units, from more than 170 entries.

February 4, 2015 – May 1, 2015

Ripley Center

Beautiful Users

Beautiful Users introduces visitors to one of the fundamental changes in design thinking over the past half-century: the shift toward designs based on observations of human anatomy and behavior.

December 12, 2014 – April 26, 2015

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Orchids: Interlocking Science and Beauty

Thousands of live orchids and the opportunity to explore how new ideas, technologies, and inventions change the way we study, protect, and enjoy these beautiful plants.

January 24, 2015 – April 26, 2015

Natural History Museum

2013 Nature's Best Photography: Windland Smith Rice International Awards

Witness nature and wildlife through the eyes of some of the most talented amateur and professional photographers in the world.

October 24, 2014 – April 20, 2015

Natural History Museum

Portrait of Stephen Colbert

In recognition of the end of Stephen Colbert’s decade-long persona for Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, the museum has borrowed Colbert’s portrait, which was created for the final season of the show.

December 20, 2014 – April 20, 2015

Portrait Gallery

Black Box: Ragnar Kjartansson

At the 2013 Venice Biennale, Kjartansson took over a waterside post and assembled a floating concert with a brass band aboard a small, vintage-style wooden boat. What few knew at the time, however, was that the artist was filming the proceedings from a different perspective; the resulting footage is the core of "S.S. Hangover."

October 28, 2014 – April 19, 2015

Hirshhorn Museum

Portraiture Now: Staging the Self

Discover how Latino artists approach portraiture and how they contribute to telling the full American story.

August 22, 2014 – April 12, 2015

Portrait Gallery

Days of Endless Time

The galleries will be transformed into a compelling refuge where visitors enter a poetic, drifting, reflective realm that Jorge Luis Borges once characterized in a phrase, days of endless time…

October 16, 2014 – April 6, 2015

Hirshhorn Museum

Separate and Unequaled: Black Baseball in the District of Columbia

This exhibition provides an overview of the popularity of African American baseball teams played on segregated fields in Washington, DC, from Reconstruction to the second half of the 20th century.

November 10, 2008 – March 31, 2015

Anacostia Community Museum

The Lost Bird Project

Bronze sculptures immortalize North American birds that have been driven to extinction.

March 27, 2014 – March 15, 2015

Smithsonian Gardens

Rising Up: Hale Woodruff's Murals at Talladega College

Six murals by Atlanta-based artist Hale Woodruff for Talladega College, Alabama, trace the rise of African Americans from slavery to freedom.

November 7, 2014 – March 1, 2015

American History Museum

A Day in the Life: Artists' Diaries from the Archives of American Art

Direct and private, diaries provide firsthand accounts of appointments made and met, places seen, and work in progress—all laced with personal ruminations, name-dropping, and the occasional sketch or doodle.

September 26, 2014 – February 28, 2015

Archives of American Art

The Singing and the Silence: Birds in Contemporary Art

Explore how contemporary artists employ bird imagery as a conduit for understanding contemporary culture.

October 31, 2014 – February 22, 2015

American Art Museum