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Smithsonian American Art Museum Review

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Smithsonian American Art Museum

Address: 8th and G Sts. NW, East End, Washington, DC | Map It
Phone: 202/633-1000
www.americanart.si.edu

Category: Museums/Galleries
Location: East End

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Fodor's Review:

Home to the United States' first federal art collection, the Smithsonian American Art Museum is considered the world's biggest and most diverse collection of American art. Its more than 41,000 holdings span three centuries, from colonial portraits to 21st-century abstractionists. Among the thousands of American artists represented are John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, David Hockney, and Robert Rauschenberg. This museum is in the Old Patent Office Building along with the National Portrait Gallery.

The American folk art exhibit is fabulous, from the ceramic Elvis Presley-shaped jug, to the enormous, intricate altarpiece crafted out of tinfoil, to the Coke-bottle quilt sewn by a grandmother from Yakoo County, Mississippi. American art came into its own by the late 19th and early 20th century. The museum's collections of works from this period are among the world's biggest and best, from the light-filled neo-impressionist canvasses of Mary Cassatt and Childe Hassam, to the sophisticated Gilded Age portraits of turn-of-the-century high society by Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler.

An explosion of American innovation shifted the center of the 20th-century art world from Paris to New York. The museum's top floor celebrates these achievements: a hallway lined with Andy Warhol's prints, Jackson Pollack's splatter canvases, and Robert Indiana's seminal "The Figure Five" leads to rooms of quintessentially American installations, like Alexander Calder mobiles, and Nam June Paik's billboard-size neon-and-television-screen U.S. map.

At any given time, more than 3,000 of the museum's holdings are in storage, but you can view them all at Luce Foundation Center's glassed-in archives on the third and fourth floors. At computer kiosks set among the archives, you can look up any work and find out exactly where it is in the exhibits or archives. The third floor Upper West Side café offers a good rest stop, with drinks, snacks, and a view into the Luce Foundation Center's glassed-in archives. There are free docent-led tours every day at noon and 2. The museum regularly holds lectures, films, and evenings of live jazz among the exhibits. Check the Web site for what's on during your visit.

Cost: Free
Open: Daily 11:30-7
Metro: Gallery Pl./Chinatown

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