Smithsonian American Art Museum
Lincoln Gallery
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 Location in Washington, D.C.
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| Established | 1829 |
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| Location | 8th & F Streets NW, Washington, D.C. |
| Coordinates | 38°53′49″N 77°01′22″W / 38.897°N 77.022689°WCoordinates: 38°53′49″N 77°01′22″W / 38.897°N 77.022689°W |
| Type | Art museum, Design/Textile Museum, Heritage Museum |
| Visitors | 1.2 million (2013) |
| Director | Elizabeth Broun |
| Curator |
Virginia M. Mecklenburg |
| Public transit access |
 Gallery Place-Chinatown
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| Website | americanart.si.edu |
Virginia M. Mecklenburg
John G. Hanhardt
Eleanor Jones Harvey
John P. Jacob
Karen Lemmey
Michael Mansfield
Joanna Marsh
Joann Moser
E. Carmen Ramos
Leslie Umberger
Nora Atkinson
The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM, and formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C.. It has one of the world's largest and most inclusive collections of art, from the colonial period to the present, made in the United States. The museum has more than 7,000 artists represented in the collection, which contains the largest collection of New Deal art; a collection of contemporary craft, American impressionist paintings, and masterpieces from the Gilded Age; photography, modern folk art, works by African American and Latino artists, images of western expansion, and realist art from the first half of the twentieth century. Most exhibitions take place in the museum's main building, the old Patent Office Building (shared with the National Portrait Gallery), while craft-focused exhibitions are shown in the museum's Renwick Gallery.
The museum provides electronic resources to schools and the public through its national education program, including Artful Connections, real-time video conference tours. It maintains seven online research databases with more than 500,000 records, including the Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture that document more than 400,000 artworks in public and private collections worldwide. Since 1951, the museum has maintained a traveling exhibition program; as of 2013, more than 2.5 million visitors have seen the exhibitions.
American Art's main building, the Old Patent Office Building, is a National Historic Landmark and is considered an example of Greek Revival architecture in the United States. It was designed by architects Robert Mills, and Thomas U. Walter. During the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institution worked on restoring the building. The 2000-2006 renovation included restoring the porticos modeled after the Parthenon in Athens, a curving double staircase, colonnades, vaulted galleries, large windows, and skylights as long as a city block. According to the Smithsonian Institution, "Extraordinary effort was made to use new preservation technologies to restore the historic fabric of the building and re-use historic materials." During the renovation, the Lunder Conservation Center, the Luce Foundation Center for American Art, Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium, and the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard were added to the building.
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