Exhibitions in Washington, DC

National Museum of Natural HistoryFree

America's national mammal, from 100,000 years of shaping the prairie to near-extinction and recovery. A six-foot bull bison, an ancient bison skull and a North American prairie soundscape.

National Museum of Women in the ArtsPast

The first focus exhibition of NMWA's Pueblo pottery collection, celebrating the women potters of the American Southwest who have shaped clay jars and bowls for over two millennia.

National Museum of American HistoryFree

The museum's semiquincentennial blockbuster: 250 objects across all three floors, from Jefferson's writing desk to the 1776 gunboat Philadelphia. Closes at the end of 2026 (exact date not yet announced).

Anacostia Community MuseumFree

Ahead of the museum's 60th anniversary, this show asks how Washingtonians keep their own history - anchored by the diary of Adam Francis Plummer, with letters, photographs and hands-on archiving stations.

Glenstone MuseumFreePast

Bronzes by Simone Leigh in Room 1 of the Pavilions: Sentinel (Mami Wata), the portrait Sharifa, and Last Garment, installed in the Water Court and visible from the gallery.

National Gallery of ArtFreePast

115 works on paper by 95 artists — Dorothea Lange, Carrie Mae Weems, Thomas Hart Benton, Roy Lichtenstein and more — grouped as Land, Community and Freedom for America's 250th.

National Gallery of ArtFreePast

Some 20 works trace two centuries of Niagara's shifting meanings, anchored by Frederic Edwin Church's panoramic Niagara of 1857.

National Museum of Asian ArtFreePast

Two recent paintings of water: Hiroshi Senju's poured-pigment waterfalls and Bingyi's ink scrolls, painted outdoors and left to the sea breeze and humidity.

National Gallery of ArtFreePast

A 23-foot screen under the West Building's Rotunda dome, where Clifford Ross builds breaking ocean waves out of millions of glowing pixels.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenFree

A century of upheaval across the second-floor outer ring: hundreds of works by Bacon, Dubuffet, Krasner, Lawrence, O'Keeffe and Pollock, rotated periodically and threaded with contemporary responses.

Smithsonian American Art MuseumFree

A ten-minute animation in which a British East India Company man dissolves into shifting Indo-Persian miniatures, scored by Pulitzer-winning composer Du Yun.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenFree

Pendleton's first solo show in Washington, DC fills the second-floor inner ring with new and recent paintings plus a single-channel video, staged for the museum's circular galleries.

National Gallery of ArtFree

Four paintings across six centuries — Titian, Cezanne and Rozeal. — hung together to show how artists answer the art history they inherit.

Smithsonian American Art MuseumFree

Nick Cave remakes the galleries as a dig site: crafted mammoth hides and bones, a video of the beasts come alive, and hundreds of found objects laid out like specimens.

National Portrait GalleryFree

An encore hang of 20 vintage prints by MGM's in-house glamour portraitist — Garbo, Harlow, Crawford, Gable and Dietrich, lit to look immortal.

National Museum of the American IndianFree

The first major retrospective of Hoocąk sculptor Truman Lowe: nearly 50 works in willow, feathers and pigment that evoke the rivers, waterfalls and canoes of the Wisconsin woodlands.

Dumbarton Oaks Museum & GardensFree

A vivid portrait of Robert Woods Bliss as an early twentieth-century collector, drawn from the estate's own holdings. Special Exhibitions Gallery.

National Museum of African American History and CultureFree

Black religious life seen through Johnson Publishing Company photographs from Ebony and Jet, where the holy and the profane meet in music, protest and pop culture.

Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens

A long-term loan portrait of Lloyd Walton Patterson, who travelled to Soviet Russia in 1932 for the film Black and White and stayed, opening up the history of Black Americans in the USSR.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenFree

Ten room-swallowing installations trace immersive art from the late 1960s on — Flavin, Gilliam, Irwin, Pape and Long, then Chan, Eliasson, Finch, Johnson and Rottenberg. Five shown here for the first time.

National Archives MuseumFree

America250 show marking the Declaration's 250th anniversary, in three parts: the Revolution, the preservation of the original parchment, and how Americans have celebrated independence since 1776.

National Portrait GalleryFree

New portraits of the 2025 award winners — Jamie Dimon, Temple Grandin, Joy Harjo and Steven Spielberg — including commissions by David Lenz and Kate Capshaw.

National Museum of American HistoryFree

The overlooked history of a trailblazing Filipino community in California, from the 1910s to the 1970s.

National Museum of Women in the Arts

The museum-wide collection installation, rejecting chronology for themes like Photo Credit, Seeing Red and Objectified across six continents and six centuries of women artists.

National Museum of the American IndianFree

Original treaties on loan from the National Archives, wampum belts and peace medals tell the story of US–Native diplomacy from the colonial era to the present.

National Portrait GalleryFree

Nine modern prints struck from Mathew Brady's original Civil War-era negatives — Lincoln, Hawthorne, Grant and Emma, Queen of Hawai'i — shown with a glass plate and Brady's wooden storage box.

National Museum of American HistoryFree

From the streets of Havana to the dance floors of New York and beyond, this bilingual show traces how salsa grew into a defining sound of the United States.

National Museum of Asian ArtFree

On the Freer plaza facing the National Mall, a monumental empty plinth held aloft by hundreds of small striding figures, questioning who monuments are for.