As the United States reaches its 250th anniversary, museums across the country are celebrating the semiquincentennial with exhibitions that reflect the nation’s art, culture, and unfinished narratives. From expansive presentations of art by Indigenous Americans to creative interpretations of the Statue of Liberty, the shows explore how American identity has been constructed through visual and material culture. With themes including migration and modernity, familiar icons like George Washington and the U.S. flag allow artists to tackle the complexity of patriotism and national identity in 2026.
As the nation reflects on the last 250 years, here are 11 exhibitions that offer compelling lenses through which to see where the country has been and where it might be headed.
“Containing Multitudes”
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis
Through Aug. 2
“Containing Multitudes” uses photography to examine the complexity of American life, embracing contradiction as a defining national characteristic. Drawing its title from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the exhibition presents photos that capture a wide spectrum of experiences—intimate, celebratory, unsettling, and unresolved.
Featured photographers work with documentary traditions as well as experimental approaches. Several depict everyday life as well as moments of historical consequence, including Dawoud Bey, Catherine Opie, Carrie Mae Weems, and Walker Evans. There are portraits of individuals, like Jaida Grey Eagle’s photograph Leonard (2025) of an Indigenous elder, and communities like Stephanie Syjuco’s portrayal of 11 Filipino women in native attire. Other images depict public space, labor, protest, and leisure, offering a layered view of American society.
The exhibition reveals how photographers have shaped—and challenged—national self-perception, often by focusing on lives and places excluded from dominant narratives. As a semiquincentennial exhibition, “Containing Multitudes” resists patriotic nostalgia, instead proposing that America’s defining feature may be its unresolved tensions.
“Ties of Our Common Kindred”
Glenstone Museum, Travilah, Maryland
Ongoing
At Glenstone Museum, “Ties of Our Common Kindred” focuses on American art of the last century, drawing from the museum’s acclaimed collection. Works by Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Cindy Sherman, and others trace the evolution of art from Abstract Expressionism and Pop art to contemporary portraiture.
Yet the exhibition is less about stylistic milestones than about relationships—between artists, ideas, and shared historical conditions. Walker Evans’s photos, for example, depict the hardships of the lived American experience. Included in the show is one of his portraits of Allie Mae Burroughs, a sharecropper who the artist documented for several weeks in 1936, evoking the reality many faced in the Great Depression.
Other works, like Thomas Demand’s photograph Presidency (2008), capture the pomp and ceremony of the U.S. government in an image of the Oval Office. The show also focuses on themes of consumerism and mass media, seen best in Barbara Kruger’s photographic silkscreen Untitled (I shop therefore I am) (1987). It’s a declaration that reveals the rise of capitalism and materialism in the 1980s in the U.S., and still resonates today. Together, the works in “Ties of Our Common Kindred” offer a broad range of creative responses to the pressures of modernity, politics, and perception.
Titus Kaphar and Junius Brutus Stearns
“Pictures More Famous than the Truth”
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia
Through July 26
Junius Brutus Stearns’s idealized portrayals of George Washington helped shape a heroic visual mythology of the nation’s founding, presenting sanitized scenes of leadership and unity. Now, in a pointed conversation between past and present, this show pairs those paintings with those by contemporary Black artist Titus Kaphar.
Kaphar’s paintings and sculptures disrupt Stearns’s themes by exposing what—and who—was excluded, an important reminder of the power of those who enshrine history. His paintings and sculptures rework scenes similar to those Stearns made familiar to foreground marginalized figures pushed to the margins of history. In Shadows of Liberty (2016), for example, Kaphar shows George Washington sitting proudly on horseback with his sword raised. Covering the figure’s body, Kaphar nailed strips of another painting he made that resembles a historic document and is based on lists of enslaved people on Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation. The strips and nails nearly smother Washington’s face, as if suffocating him with his own brutal history.
Indeed, the exhibition’s title, “Pictures More Famous than the Truth,” underscores how visual culture can create reality as much as it reveals it. By placing Stearns’s and Kaphar’s works side by side, the exhibition demonstrates how images gain authority over time—and how contemporary artists can challenge that authority.
“America 250: Common Threads”
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
Through July 27
With “America 250: Common Threads,” Crystal Bridges undertakes a sweeping survey of American art, organized by theme, rather than time period. Spanning 250 years of artistic production, the exhibition foregrounds connections across periods, regions, and communities, revealing how artists repeatedly return to shared concerns such as labor, belief, identity, and the land.
Historical paintings are placed in conversation with contemporary works, highlighting how certain questions—about freedom, belonging, and power—remain unresolved. Included in the show are historic quilts with patriotic symbols, markers of nationalism over generations. Other works feature recurring images like eagles and depictions of George Washington. In Mari Hernandez’s self-portrait Colonizer (2017), for instance, she appropriates the visual codes of power and conquest by dressing herself as Washington with white makeup lightening her skin and colonial garb.
The exhibition’s title signals its curatorial approach: American art is treated as a woven fabric of intersecting stories rather than a single dominant narrative, allowing viewers to trace affinities across time.
“House Made of Dawn: Art by Native Americans, 1880–Now”
New York Historical Society, New York City
Apr. 22–Ongoing
Often, American art has been defined by anglocentric narratives, excluding artists of color and marginalized groups. Among the artists overlooked or silenced are Indigenous Americans, whose cultures and very existence are often viewed as something of the past, rather than of the present and future. “House Made of Dawn: Art by Native Americans, 1880–Now” seeks to correct this by reframing American art history and centering Indigenous figures as key contributors to modernism and contemporary practice. The exhibition brings together works by more than 85 artists representing diverse Native nations, media, and generations.
Indigenous belief systems often underpin the paintings, sculptures, textiles, photography, and works on paper on view. Included is Fritz Scholder, a La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians artist, whose lithograph Patriotic Indian (1975) challenges stereotypes of Indigenous Americans. It depicts a Native man as patriotic and dignified in vivid colors as opposed to the racist tropes common in American art.
The exhibition’s title, drawn from N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, evokes renewal and endurance, underscoring how Indigenous art persists despite centuries of displacement and erasure. By situating Native artists firmly within the story of American modernism, the show challenges entrenched hierarchies and offers a more expansive account of the nation’s artistic legacy.
“A Nation of Artists”
Philadelphia Museum of Art (Apr. 12–July 5, 2027) and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts / Middleton Family Collection (Apr. 12–Sept. 5, 2027), Philadelphia
Among the most ambitious projects tied to the U.S. semiquincentennial, “A Nation of Artists” unfolds across two Philadelphia institutions, presenting more than 1,000 artworks spanning the 18th century to today. Together, the two venues offer a sweeping, cross-generational perspective of how artistic production both reflected and reshaped the nation’s first 250 years.
At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, highlights include Red Hills and Bones (1941), a stunning painting of a red landscape with parts of an animal skeleton by Georgia O’Keeffe that captures the vast, dry frontier of the American Southwest that the artist made her home. Other paintings focus on the rich texture of the nation’s landscapes, including an awe-inspiring painting, Mists in the Yellowstone (1908), by Thomas Moran at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Elsewhere, a mixed-media collaged portrait painting by Mickalene Thomas Din Avec la Main Dans le Miroir (2008), which celebrates her Black female subject in the artist’s distinctive, jagged style.
With a diverse line-up of artists and concerns, the show seeks to capture a nuanced understanding of what it means to be an artist in America over the last 250 years, as well as Philadelphia’s role in shaping it.
“American Icon: The U.S. Flag in Art”
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
June 6–Dec. 6
The American flag is among the most charged symbols in visual culture, not just in the States, but across the world. “American Icon: The U.S. Flag in Art” examines how artists have repeatedly reimagined the motif across painting, prints, and photography, embracing its symbolism—both positive and negative. Featuring works by Jasper Johns, Dorothea Lange, Faith Ringgold, and others, the exhibition traces how the flag’s meaning has shifted across time.
Johns, for instance, uses the flag in his artwork as both a physical object and an abstract concept that stands in for power itself. Meanwhile Lange, who is known for her documentary photographs, uses the American flag as a politically charged metaphor for lived experience across the nation. For example, she shot harrowing images of young Japanese students pledging their allegiance to the flag before being incarcerated during World War II, a statement of both unification and exclusion.
These differing interpretations mirror the nation’s ideological divides. As a semiquincentennial exhibition, “American Icon: The U.S. Flag in Art” promises to capture the ways that the U.S. flag evokes patriotism, dissent, and ambivalence.
“American Stories: From Revolution to Rockwell”
Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts
June 6–Oct. 26
“American Stories: From Revolution to Rockwell” examines how the medium of illustration has shaped national identity from the Revolutionary era to the present. Over the years, this art form has translated ideals into accessible narratives for mass audiences. The show includes iconic images like J. Howard Miller’s We Can Do It! (1942), a poster for Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company featuring Rosie the Riveter.
Norman Rockwell’s works make up a large part of the exhibition, but the show also contains pieces from the present day with contemporary artists such as painters Kay WalkingStick and Faith Ringgold, and quilter Susan Hudson. In Hudson’s quilt MMIW: The Tree of Many Dresses (2020), the Navajo/Diné artist depicts a woman mourning near a tree with dresses hanging from its branches. In her depictions of the soil underground are harrowing images of a woman being abducted. The work draws attention to the ongoing violence and kidnapping of Indigenous women, a tragedy that Native communities have faced for generations. These works, side-by-side with Rockwell’s wholesome, idealistic vision of America, reveal how illustration can both reinforce and challenge dominant cultural myths.
“The Statue of Liberty from Bartholdi to Warhol”
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Forth Worth, Texas
Aug. 16–Jan. 3, 2027
Few symbols encapsulate America as vividly as the Statue of Liberty. This exhibition traces the evolution of Lady Liberty’s image from its 19th-century origins to its reinvention in Pop art and beyond, revealing how artists have repeatedly reinterpreted the monument in response to shifting social and political realities.
Beginning with works tied to Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s original concept, the exhibition explores how the statue quickly transcended its status as a physical monument to become a cultural symbol. The monumental copper statue of a robed woman holding a torch and tablet has stood on Liberty Island since 1886, a beacon that represented many immigrants’ entry to the country. Over time, artists have portrayed the Statue of Liberty to address the disillusionment of immigration. For example, Henry Yuzuru Sugimoto’s Untitled (Stop Picture Bride) (1965), shows a man who appears to have immigrated to the U.S., faced by Uncle Sam telling him his wife must remain in Japan. Other images like Andy Warhol’s silkscreens depicting the monument evoke the cultural power of the statue in mass media.
Tracing the statue’s image from the 1870s to the present, the show hopes to underscore how American ideals are constantly projected, contested, and revised.
“Much Here Is Beautiful: Photography Surveys of the U.S. Bicentennial”
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Sept. 18, 2026–Apr. 18, 2027
Revisiting the 1976 Bicentennial through the lens of photography, “Much Here is Beautiful: Photography Surveys of the U.S. Bicentennial” examines how artists documented the nation before, during, and after that milestone. At the time, the National Endowment for the Arts funded the creation of thousands of photographs of everyday life by artists across the country, drawing inspiration from a similar federal project initiated during the Great Depression. The photographs capture Americans at work, at home, and in public life.
By returning to this earlier moment of national celebration with the Bicentennial, the exhibition invites reflection on how national self-image has evolved over the last half-century. The photographs oscillate between optimism and critique, suggesting a country grappling with change and hardship.
“Folk Nation: Crafting Patriotism in the United States”
American Folk Art Museum, New York City
Apr. 10–Sept. 13
A wood carving of Uncle Sam sitting atop a toy whirligig; an intimate memorial to three assassinated presidents; a painting of Lady Liberty by self-taught artist Reverend B.F. Perkins welcoming all those persecuted, hungry, and sick: these objects capture a precious view of how America has seen itself over generations.
As notions of national identity shifted with political and cultural changes, so too did the art and objects people lived with. “Folk Nation: Crafting Patriotism in the United States” explores how vernacular and folk art traditions have contributed to grassroots expressions of American identity. Featuring quilts, carvings, banners, toys, and handmade objects, the exhibition traces how everyday makers engage with national symbols and ideas beginning with a young nation at the onset of the Revolutionary War and winding through generations of conflict and change. For example, Edward Hicks’s painting The Peaceable Kingdom with the Leopard of Serenity (1835–40) is one of many versions of a messianic prophecy in which animals representing predatory and prey are shown together in harmony. Reflecting hope for peace in the U.S., Hicks added images of settlers and Indigenous Americans enacting a treaty.
The works on view span artistic objects and flea-market finds, and all of them reflect personal belief, local tradition, and communal response to historical events. Patriotism, it shows, is partly crafted through material culture.
