Image: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C
The Smithsonian American Art Museum will open ‘Much Here Is Beautiful: Photography Surveys of the U.S. Bicentennial’ on September 18, bringing together 225 photographs made through regional projects funded by the National Endowment for the Arts around the 1976 bicentennial. The exhibition will remain on view at the museum in Washington, D.C., through April 18, 2027.
The exhibition examines photographs of people and places across the United States during the 1970s and early 1980s, while placing the bicentennial surveys within a longer history of federally supported documentary photography. Its geographic organization follows four sections—Northeast, South, Midwest and West—and includes images from projects spanning locations from the California coast to the Kansas heartland and New York City.
For the bicentennial, the NEA created a grant program supporting regional photographic surveys intended to document the country’s communities and landscapes. Inspired by the Farm Security Administration’s photography of the Great Depression, the initiative lasted six years and supported more than 70 surveys, producing thousands of photographs by more than 200 photographers. In 1983, the Smithsonian American Art Museum received 1,000 photographs by NEA grant recipients, including prints from 13 of the survey projects.
‘Much Here Is Beautiful’ expands beyond that institutional history by drawing on the museum’s photography holdings and research into related works held in collections across the country. The exhibition presents previously unseen works and new discoveries alongside material that traces the continuing influence of survey photography on generations of artists. Its title comes from Robert Hayden’s poem ‘American Journal.’ Hayden served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now known as U.S. Poet Laureate, from 1976 to 1978.
The photographs include work by Terry Evans, Eric Baden, Sage Sohier, Wendy Ewald, Ted Wathen, Gary Monroe, Tom Arndt, Lewis Koch, Penny Wolin, Anthony Hernandez, Mark Klett and Janet Delaney. Wathen’s 1975 gelatin silver print ‘Former Company Houses, Jenkins, Letcher County, Kentucky,’ held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is among the works identified in the exhibition material.
John P. Jacob, the McEvoy Family Senior Curator for Photography, and Krystle Stricklin, assistant curator of photography, organized the exhibition. A fully illustrated catalogue, published by Radius Books in partnership with the museum, will accompany the presentation and is listed for sale at $65. The Smithsonian American Art Museum, which is open daily from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m., is organizing the exhibition with free admission.
An opening open house will take place at the museum on September 18 from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in the first-floor Osher and Eisenstein Family Galleries. The program is free, with registration encouraged, and will include conversations with photographers represented in the exhibition as well as the two organizers. A gallery talk is scheduled for October 15, followed by further programs in October and November, including a conservation gallery talk on 19th-century photography.
