Current Exhibitions

My Visit

The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture

The Shape of Power examines the ways in which sculpture has shaped and reflected attitudes and understandings about race in the U.S.

November 8, 2024 – September 14, 2025

American Art Museum
My Visit

Sightlines: Chinatown and Beyond

Sightlines: Chinatown and Beyond highlights the imprint of Asian Americans on the physical and cultural terrain of Washington, D.C.

September 7, 2024 – November 30, 2025

American Art Museum
My Visit

Shahzia Sikander: The Last Post

Through precisely inked and animated scenes, this video artwork critically considers the legacy of British colonialism in Asia.

July 3, 2025 – July 12, 2026

American Art Museum
My Visit

Artist to Artist

Paired artworks, each representing two figures whose trajectories intersected at a creatively crucial moment.

October 1, 2021 – August 2, 2026

American Art Museum
My Visit

Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass

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.

December 8, 2023 – December 6, 2026

American Art Museum
My Visit

Experience America

Through New Deal programs, the federal government paid artists to paint and sculpt and urged them to look to the nation’s land and people for subjects.

August 14, 2014 – Ongoing

American Art Museum
My Visit

Glenn Kaino: Bridge

Glenn Kaino’s powerful aerial sculpture Bridge is comprised of 200 golden arms hanging from the ceiling of SAAM’s Luce Foundation Center.

July 26, 2024 – Ongoing

American Art Museum
My Visit

Galleries for Modern and Contemporary Art

The museum's permanent collection freshly examines the explosion of possibility in American art between the 1940s and today.

September 22, 2023 – Ongoing

American Art Museum
My Visit

Folk and Self-Taught Art

These galleries serve as a reminder that not all artists are formally trained and that the making of art is as much an act of passion as of intellect.

October 21, 2016 – Ongoing

American Art Museum
My Visit

Luce Foundation Center for American Art

The first visible art storage and study center in Washington showcases more than 3,300 artworks from the museum's permanent collection.

July 1, 2006 – Permanent

American Art Museum
My Visit

American Art through 1940

Artworks that connect with major moments in America’s past, from early America to the settlement of the western frontier, the Civil War, and the Gilded Age.

July 1, 2006 – Ongoing

American Art Museum