Images from the museum's collection are used to explore the roles individual African Americans played during the Civil War.

Learn how new discoveries shed light on psychiatrist and scholar Paul Singer's collection of Chinese archaeological objects and on ancient life in China.

Learn about the role of museums in the everyday lives of American artists.

Learn how two events 100 years apart changed the course of the nation in this exhibition featuring such items as Abraham Lincoln's top hat, Harriet Tubman's shawl, and photographs of the March on Washington.

This exhibition offers an unprecedented view into artist Nam June Paik's creative method.

Winning entries from the 2012 Smithsonian Staff Photo Contest offer a deeper understanding of the Smithsonian and its talented staff.

Learn about early Buddhist sculptures in China during the Tang dynasty.

See how this contemporary artist addresses memory through cultural and personal symbols.

This mouth-watering exhibition explores the social changes that have changed how we eat and features Julia Child's kitchen.

Explore the boundaries that once defined drawing and portraiture through the works of artists Mequitta Ahuja, Mary Borgman, Adam Chapman, Ben Durham, Till Freiwald, and Rob Matthews.

See works recently aquired by the museum.

View DEMOCRACIA's video project Ser y Durar [To Be and to Last] about a group of traceurs performing parkour in a Madrid cemetery.

Explore how urban waterways, such as the Anacostia River, can be both barriers and economic resources for the community.

Learn how music and dance continue to bind American Indian communities to all living things, to the earth, to the spirit world, and -- when people have deep ancestral claims to their dances -- to the past.

See a wagon that helped America's westward expansion to the Pacific.

Learn about the Census of Marine Life, the most comprehensive inventory of known marine life ever compiled and cataloged.

See how the Chelsea neighborhood of London rapidly changed in the 1880s through the eyes of artist James McNeill Whistler.

Visit the American Trail, the Zoo's new home for seals, sea lions, and brown pelicans, which is modeled on the central California coast. Also located here are bald eagles, gray wolves, North American river otters, beavers, and ravens.

See Native American toys from all over North, Central, and South America and find out what life lessons and traditions they teach. 

Famous for her incisive photomontages, Barbara Kruger (American, b. Newark, NJ, 1945) creates this immersive site-specific piece that explores themes of democracy, doubt, and belief.