Moments from Smithsonian American Art Museum

The Smithsonian American Art Museum occupies the Old Patent Office Building, one of the oldest public buildings in Washington DC, a Greek Revival structure that served during the Civil War as a barracks and hospital for Union soldiers, Walt Whitman among the volunteers who tended the wounded there, and later hosted Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural ball in 1865, all before it ever became an art museum. That layered civic history sits underneath a collection with a genuinely distinctive focus on American folk and self-taught art alongside more conventional fine art, giving the museum real depth in outsider and vernacular American traditions that many national collections overlook.

Don't miss Nam June Paik's Electronic Superhighway, a room-filling installation made of dozens of televisions and neon tubing mapping out the United States state by state, a work that treats American mass media and geography as inseparable subjects and remains one of the most ambitious video art installations permanently on view anywhere. The building itself shares its structure with the National Portrait Gallery, so budget time for both if portraiture interests you, they're functionally two museums under one historic roof with a single shared, sky-lit courtyard between them, a genuinely pleasant place to sit regardless of which collection you came for.