American Art Museum and Photography Gallery

This museum is a few blocks up from the National Mall where most of the other Smithsonian Museums are located. It was filled with paintings, sculpture, craft, works on paper and pioneering collections.

It is right across from the Spy Museum. This double-decker bus is one of the many ways you can tour Washington DC. Everything you read about parking in Washington DC; however we always lucked out finding handicapped parking.

Among the art works found at the American Art Musesum are done by Georgia O'Keeffe, James Hamption, Thomas Hart Benton, Albert Bierstadt, John Singer Sargent, John LaFarge, Jenney Holzer, Beth Lipman, Larry Fuente. These collections are from colonial times, 19th and 20th century.

The one I found most fascinating was For SAAM which was 6,200 LED lights which brought words to a ceiling to floor sculpture that was programmed to swirl and travel around the body of the piece.

These are from the colonial collection:

Abraham Lincoln

Robert E. Lee

Ulysses S. Grant

Paintings from the 20th Century collections include people like Hiliary Clinton, music artists and just a little bit about every segment of our American history.

Here is a collection of license plates from every state in the United States.
There was a small exhibit for Elvis Presley called the Echoes of Elvis at the Museum

This is the original patent swinging machine designed by Isaac Singer.

There was also a special exhibit of original Norman Rockwell paintings from the collections of
George Lucas and Steven Spielburg. My sister, Teri, is a Norman Rockwell collector. I was excited to be able to take pictures of the original paintings -- until a guard tapped on my shoulder to tell me I could not take pictures. I couldn't even sneak pictures -- this exhibit had one or two guards in every room. It was a big collection.