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Collection Features

Dig deeper with staff-curated collection highlights that focus on a variety of themes and subjects.

  • The Artful Presidency: Selections from the Archives of American Art
    The Artful Presidency, an online exhibition, is presented by the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art to celebrate the connections between American artists and the American presidency from George Washington to the Carter administration. It compleme

  • Robert Alexander: Temple of Man
    The Temple of Man is not an edifice but a community of Beat poets, artists, and musicians founded in San Francisco in 1960 by assemblage artist Robert “Baza” Alexander (1923–1987).

  • Henry Mosler's Civil War Diary
    This digital exhibition presents and interprets Mosler's Civil War diary. Visitors can read his writing, examine published illustrations, mark events of his life on the timeline, and explore selected diary entries in greater depth in highlights.

  • Chicago Art and Artists in the Archives of American Art
    The Archives of American Art holds rich resources documenting important Chicago artists, art institutions, and organizations, and we have selected some rare and unique materials from those resources to highlight here.

  • A Guide to Provenance Research at the Archives of American Art
    This Guide to Provenance Research is the result of a project funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to enhance access to the Archives’ World War II era provenance research collections.The study of provenance—the history of ownership of a work of ar

  • 1913 Armory Show: The Story in Primary Sources
    The Smithsonian's Archives of American Art commemorates the centennial of the International Exhibition of Modern Art, known as the 1913 Armory Show--the first major exhibition of European modern art in the U.S.

Jervis McEntee Diaries

The McEntee diaries were donated to the Archives in 1964 by one of Jervis McEntee's heirs, Mrs. Helen S. McEntee. Curator Garnett McCoy immediately delved into them, producing transcripts and indexing names that resulted, 4 years later, in a lengthy article in the Archives' Journal (Vol. 4, No. 3, July 1964). Through a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, Inc., the Archives of American Art has built upon McCoy's work to provide unprecedented access to this valuable resource.