Get Involved
Internship, fellowship, and volunteer opportunities provide students and lifelong learners with the ability to contribute to the study and preservation of visual arts records in America.
Past Exhibitions
Revisit almost twenty years of the Archives’ past exhibitions covering various topics, projects, and events in art history.
- What happens when one looks for what has been previously suppressed or overlooked: in this case the existence of lesbian and gay relationships and representations in the Archive?Lesbian and gay artists have made a strong imprint on American art for a
- A great economic depression was sweeping the United States and the American workers, and the artists too, had their own troubles to worry about. Wages were being slashed, strikes were taking place everywhere. Strong men were selling apples on street
- As store ads fill your mailbox at home and spam fills your inbox at work, rekindle your holiday spirit with hand-made holiday cards. The cards featured in this exhibition offer insight into how artists imagined the holidays. Collectively these holida
- Every year in December, painters Kathleen Blackshear (1897-1988) and Ethel Spears (1902-1974) received a flurry of holiday cards. These hand-made sentiments are testament to their close relationships with fellow artists, students, and friends active
- In the late 20th century, some artists—and others in the art world—began using film and video to document their lives and work. Many of the Archives of American Art’s collections from this period contain audiovisual documents alongside traditional ar
- To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Archives' oral history program, we have selected audio excerpts from some of our most fascinating interviews and paired them with photographs from our collections. Lee Krasner rejects the word 'drip' as an acc
- In 2008 the Archives of American Art acquired the papers of Paul Ryan (b. 1943), a pioneering video artist, writer, teacher and theoretician who works and lives in New York City.Ryan’s work appeared in the groundbreaking exhibition TV as a Creative M
- Each year, as the days get longer and the weather warmer, people everywhere welcome summer and its charms. For many artists, summer offers an opportunity to concentrate fully on their work, without the constraints of teaching or the distractions of c
- Ever wonder what unknown treasures exist in the Archives of American Art's collections?This unique exhibition showcases a variety of collections and various types of materials, each chosen by Archives staff members, allowing the viewer to see the col
- Love letters bring out the voyeur in most of us. These deeply personal communications have the power to make us blush or, at the very least, to let us observe a tender moment in the complex lives of others.This selection of affectionate communiqués t
- An abstract artist and a passionate advocate of abstraction in America, Charles Green Shaw seemed to live a charmed life. Born into wealth, he reveled in the glamorous social scene of New York in the 1920s. After a successful career writing about tha
- Sketchbooks are as varied as the artists who keep them. Social realist painter Reginald Marsh cut and bound scrap paper to fit the size of his coat pocket, modernist Charles Green Shaw tested abstract shapes in large spiral-bound books, and Oscar Blu
- Often the expression of joy or affection, illustrated letters represent an irrepressible urge to picture language. They are evidence of the writer’s use of words and images to amplify the form and effect of a message. The letters have been selected b
- This exhibition documents how vacationing artists escaped from their everyday lives.“Many artists view vacations as a time to get out of the city, to recharge in a new environment with sympathetic souls,” said Liza Kirwin, curator of manuscripts for
- In his personal papers, as in his art, Joseph Cornell embraced life's evanescence. Known mainly for his shadow box constructions, Cornell documented his passion for "exquisite surprises"- the poignant connections between memory and sensory experience
- Around 1943, artist Honoré Sharrer first conceived of the painting now known as Tribute to the American Working People. The resulting polyptych consists of five panels, each meticulously painted in oil on composition board.The Archives of American Ar
- The Park Place Group coalesced in New York in 1963. The original members—Anthony Magar, Mark di Suvero, Forrest Myers, Tamara Melcher, Robert Grosvenor, Leo Valledor, Dean Fleming, Peter Forakis, and Edwin Ruda—were mostly from the West Coast, only Grosvenor and Ruda were Easterners.
- From the sumptuously furnished studios of the late 19th century to the austere workrooms of the present day, studio spaces have played a dynamic role in the history of American art-not simply reflecting aesthetic visions, but informing them.This look
- Painter and printmaker Werner Drewes (1899-1985) studied with Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, and Oskar Schlemmer at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Born in Germany, Drewes immigrated to the United States in 1930 and was a founding member of the American Abstract
- In 1954 when art historian E. P. Richardson and collector Lawrence A. Fleischman founded the Archives, they could not have forseen the enormous changes in store for the American art world, nor the impact of their efforts on the discipline of art hist
Exhibition Chronology
Read the full chronology of exhibitions organized by the Archives of American Art.
The Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery
The Archives of American Art’s exhibition space is located two blocks away from our D.C. Research Center in the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture (8th and F Streets NW).
Please visit www.si.edu/visit for more information and to review safety requirements before your visit.
Learn more about visiting the gallery.
Hours: Open daily 11:30 a.m.–7:00 p.m.
Admission: Free