The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), the nation’s first collection of American art, is the home to one of the largest and most inclusive collections of American art in the world. Its artworks reveal America’s rich artistic and cultural history from the colonial period to today, with more than 7,000 artists are represented in the collection, The museum has been a leader in identifying and collecting significant aspects of American visual culture, including photography, modern folk and self-taught art, African American art, Latino art, and video games. The museum has the largest collection of New Deal art and exceptional collections of contemporary craft, American impressionist paintings, and masterpieces from the Gilded Age, and maintains six online research databases with more than a half million records, including the Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture that document more than 400,000 artworks in public and private collections worldwide.
The Luce Foundation Center for American Art, a study center and visible art storage facility, displays approximately 3,000 artworks from the museum’s permanent collection in a three-story skylight space and is host to a variety of public programs. The Lunder Conservation Center—state-of-the-art labs with glass walls—is the first art conservation facility to allow the public permanent behind-the-scenes views of the preservation work of the museums.
The Renwick Gallery, a branch of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, showcases the best craft objects and decorative arts from the 19th century to the present.
