Smithsonian American Art MuseumPenn Quarter

Nick Cave: Mammoth

Now showing13 February 2026 – 3 January 2027Free

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.

Exhibition website

More in Washington, DC

On now All of October 2026

At the centre of the third-floor galleries is a glowing light table of 700 square feet, set out like a fossil dig: pie pans, bingo ball cages, crocheted doilies, Nick Cave's grandmother's thimbles and tens of thousands of buttons. The Washington Post's critic called it "a couple of junk shop's worth of knickknacks and gewgaws", in a review headlined "stunning".

It is the museum's largest commission from a single artist, and it draws on Cave's childhood in Chariton County, Missouri, where his grandparents farmed. You walk in under towering lifeguard chairs, some crowned with skeletal mammoth heads, set against a 60-by-20-foot hand-beaded tapestry of that county. Next door, three hairy mammoths worked by dancers wander through present-day Chicago across four walls. A few blocks from the Natural History Museum's real fossils, this is the dig where the specimens are pie pans.

Admission is free with no ticket, daily 11:30 to 19:00, until 3 January 2027. The 24 October performances are sold out, with a waitlist.

Editor's pick

Lifeguard chairs topped with mammoth skulls stand near a 60-foot beaded tapestry, in the largest single-artist commission SAAM has made. The Washington Post called it "stunning"; found objects fill a 700-square-foot light table.

Look for

The light table
A 70-foot illuminated table laid out like paleontological specimens, where some found objects stay recognisable and others are remade into masks, creatures and contraptions.
Lifeguard chairs with mammoth skulls
Five towering lifeguard chairs rise through the main gallery, some topped with massive skeletal mammoth heads and others draped in hides.
The beaded Chariton County landscape
A 60-by-20-foot hand-beaded tapestry laid over a landscape of the Missouri county where Cave's grandparents farmed, the backdrop to the chairs.
Roam
Projected on four walls of the adjoining gallery, three woolly mammoths of hair over metal frames, animated by dancers, lumber through present-day Chicago.
The Amalgams bronzes
Casts of Cave's own body fused with flowers, birds and trees, surrounded by metal tole flowers and cast-iron doorstops, some from his grandparents' home.