Qualla: Smithsonian American Art Museum

Smithsonian American Art Museum: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frogvixen, CC BY-SA 4.0. On March 6, 1865, six weeks before he was assassinated, Abraham Lincoln held his second inaugural ball inside the Patent Office Building on F Street NW. The model room was the largest space in Washington at the time - a vaulted hall the length of a city block, with skylights overhead and porticoes outside modeled on the Parthenon. Walt Whitman, working as a hospital volunteer, walked the same corridors during the war when the model room was filled with wounded Union soldiers. A hundred and three years after Lincoln's ball, on May 6, 1968, the National Collection of Fine Arts moved into the northern half of that same building. The neighborhood around it had burned a month earlier in the riots that followed Martin Luther King's assassination. The museum reopened. The neighborhood did not, for thirty more years.

Image: Frogvixen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Smithsonian American Art Museum: An Argument About a Name

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paulo O from Halifax, Canada, CC BY 2.0. The Smithsonian Institution was founded in 1846 with a Congressional directive that it include 'a gallery of art.' For its first half-century, the institution's first secretary Joseph Henry largely ignored that instruction in favor of scientific research. An 1865 fire in the Smit...

Image: Paulo O from Halifax, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Smithsonian American Art Museum: The Old Patent Office

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zack Frank, Smithsonian American Art Museum, CC BY-SA 3.0. The home Congress finally gave the museum in 1958 is one of the most important antebellum buildings in Washington. Construction began in 1836 under Robert Mills, the architect of the Washington Monument and the Treasury Building. The Greek Revival design centered on a south porti...

Image: Zack Frank, Smithsonian American Art Museum | CC BY-SA 3.0

Smithsonian American Art Museum: 7,000 Artists

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Smith (19th centurydate QS:P,+1850-00-00T00:00:00Z/7), CC0. SAAM holds work by more than 7,000 American artists - one of the most comprehensive collections of art made in the United States from the colonial period to the present. It has the world's largest collection of New Deal art, the murals and sculptures and easel paintings commissio...

Image: John Smith (19th centurydate QS:P,+1850-00-00T00:00:00Z/7) | CC0

Smithsonian American Art Museum: Visible Storage

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zack Frank, Smithsonian American Art Museum, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the third and fourth floors of the museum sits the Luce Foundation Center, opened with the 2006 reopening - the first visible art storage facility in Washington. Visitors can browse 3,300 paintings, sculptures, folk-art objects, and crafts in 64 secure glass cases, quadrupling...

Image: Zack Frank, Smithsonian American Art Museum | CC BY-SA 3.0

Smithsonian American Art Museum: Becoming Penn Quarter

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ser Amantio di Nicolao, CC BY-SA 4.0. When the NCFA opened in 1968 the area around the Old Patent Office was, in the museum's own later phrasing, bleak and lonely. The 1968 riots had emptied F Street. Attendance stayed weak for three decades. The Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation began rebuilding F and G St...

Image: Ser Amantio di Nicolao | CC BY-SA 4.0