Past Exhibitions | Smithsonian Institution

Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past is Prologue

Internationally acclaimed artist Tiffany Chung is known for her multimedia work that explores migration, conflict, and shifting geographies in the wake of political and natural upheavals.

March 15, 2019 – September 2, 2019

American Art Museum

Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975

Artistic reactions to the Vietnam War created during the height of the US intervention in Southeast Asia are explored.

March 15, 2019 – August 18, 2019

American Art Museum

Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor

Bill Traylor is one of the most celebrated American self-taught artists. His drawn and painted imagery embodies the crossroads of multiple worlds: black and white, rural and urban, old and new.

September 28, 2018 – April 7, 2019

American Art Museum

Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs

This exhibition traces the history of A box of ten photographs between 1969 and 1973, telling the crucial story of the portfolio that established the foundation for Arbus’s posthumous career.

April 6, 2018 – January 27, 2019

American Art Museum

Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen

Artist Trevor Paglen’s work explores surveillance, state secrecy, data collection, and the ways in which technology is altering humans’ relationship with the land around us.

June 21, 2018 – January 6, 2019

American Art Museum

Do Ho Suh: Almost Home

Do Ho Suh’s immersive, dreamlike work explores the nature and meaning of home, fastening ties between personal space and shared experience.

March 16, 2018 – August 5, 2018

American Art Museum

Tamayo: The New York Years

Tamayo: The New York Years is the first exhibition to explore the influences between this major Mexican modernist and the American art world.

November 3, 2017 – March 18, 2018

American Art Museum

Kara Walker: Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)

The Smithsonian American Art Museum presents the complete set of Kara Walker's print series, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) for the first time since it was acquired in 2008.

October 13, 2017 – March 11, 2018

American Art Museum

Watch This! New Directions in the Art of the Moving Image

Watch This! New Directions in the Art of the Moving Image is a series of rotating exhibitions drawn from SAAM’s media arts collection.

March 11, 2017 – March 6, 2018

American Art Museum

Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light

This groundbreaking artist and his spellbinding light compositions are on view for the first time in nearly fifty years.

October 6, 2017 – January 7, 2018

American Art Museum

American Visionary: John F. Kennedy's Life and Times

American Visionary: John F. Kennedy’s Life and Times brings together images culled from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, Getty Images, private collections, and the Kennedy family archives that capture the dramatic scope of Kennedy’s life.

May 3, 2017 – September 17, 2017

American Art Museum

Donald Sultan: The Disaster Paintings

The exhibition includes 12 signature paintings from 1984 to 1990, including Plant, May 29, 1985 from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, which will be on view only at SAAM.

May 26, 2017 – September 4, 2017

American Art Museum

Down These Mean Streets

The exhibition will examine how Latino photographers depicted America’s urban streets when notions of the inner city began to emerge. The title of the exhibition is taken from Piri Thomas’ bestselling memoir Down These Mean Streets (1967), where the author narrates his tough upbringing in New York City’s El Barrio.

May 12, 2017 – August 6, 2017

American Art Museum

Measured Perfection: Hiram Powers' Greek Slave

This one-gallery exhibition reveals the inner workings of the studio of Hiram Powers (1805-1873), who was among the most innovative sculptors of the nineteenth century, eagerly adapting long-standing sculpture traditions to new technologies of his age.

July 3, 2015 – July 9, 2017

American Art Museum

Gene Davis: Hot Beat

Brightly colored stripes multiply in rhythmic repetitions across the surface of a painting by Gene Davis (1920-1985). Remarkably original when they first appeared in the 1960s, these paintings became the signature expression for one of the leading Color Field painters.

November 17, 2016 – April 2, 2017

American Art Museum

Harlem Heroes: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten

This installation, presented in celebration of the opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, features thirty-nine images, all works from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s permanent collection.

August 26, 2016 – April 2, 2017

American Art Museum

Isamu Noguchi, Archaic/Modern

Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) was among the most innovative American sculptors of the twentieth century, creating works that were far ahead of his time. The exhibition is the first full-scale exhibition to explore how the ancient world shaped this artist’s innovative vision for the future.

November 11, 2016 – March 19, 2017

American Art Museum

Artworks by African Americans from the Collection

In celebration of the 2016 Grand Opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, SAAM will displays 184 of its most important artworks by African Americans.

September 1, 2016 – February 28, 2017

American Art Museum

Romaine Brooks

This exhibition brings together 50 paintings and drawings from the museum’s permanent collection.

June 17, 2016 – October 2, 2016

American Art Museum

Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions

Martin Puryear (b. 1945) is one of the leading sculptors of his generation, whose work is recognized internationally for its evocative forms and exquisite craftsmanship. The exhibition explores reoccurring forms across time and medium in Puryear’s sculptures, drawings, and prints.

May 27, 2016 – September 5, 2016

American Art Museum

No Mountains in the Way

In the 1970s, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) conceived a series of photo survey projects, inspired by the epic documentary photography program undertaken by the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s. The installation of 63 vintage prints from this survey of 120 photographs, are all works from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s permanent collection.

February 26, 2016 – July 31, 2016

American Art Museum

Crosscurrents: Modern Art from the Sam Rose and Julie Walters Collection

Crosscurrents features stellar paintings and sculpture by major American artists Alexander Calder, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Georgia O’Keeffe, Wayne Thiebaud and others alongside European giants such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró.

October 30, 2015 – April 10, 2016

American Art Museum

Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty

Some 160 photographs by Irving Penn demonstrate his legacy as a modern master and place him in the context of the contemporary moment.

October 23, 2015 – March 20, 2016

American Art Museum

The Modern Pueblo Paintings of Awa Tsireh

The paintings of Awa Tsireh (1898-1955), also known by his Spanish name, Alfonso Roybal, represent an encounter between the art traditions of native Pueblo peoples in the Southwestern United States and the American modernist art style begun in New York, which spread quickly across the country.

September 4, 2015 – January 31, 2016

American Art Museum

Watch This! Revelations in Media Art

Artists have fearlessly engaged technological innovation to create an artistic revolution that continuously redefines how we imagine, receive, and understand our time. The exhibition includes forty-four works of art from 1941 to 2013, many of which were recently acquired by the museum.

April 24, 2015 – September 7, 2015

American Art Museum