Selections from the North American Collection: The United States at 250

Over the last 250 years, the United States has witnessed many changes and challenges, forming the complex context in which a diverse population of American artists have worked and continue to work. Selections from the North American Collection: The United States at 250 emphasizes the idea that history can be told—and artworks can be made—from many different perspectives.

Visitors to this installation will experience 14 objects from the museum’s permanent collection, including new acquisitions, works by Baltimoreans, and work by an Indigenous American that reveal how art objects have shaped national identity in powerful and sometimes uncomfortable ways. Significantly, an iconic image of President George Washington is juxtaposed with a contemporary ceramic featuring a portrait of abolitionist Frederick Douglass. A majolica piece, the Centennial Eagle Pitcher, that was made for the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 will also be on view. While this new acquisition’s decorative features include the United States flag and the country’s national bird, the bald eagle, it was actually made by a British ceramics firm.

Additionally, visitors will encounter A Narrative of the Negro, a 1912 textbook by historian and activist Leila Amos Pendleton celebrating the accomplishments of Black Americans—aquired by the museum in 2025—as well as landscapes by Hudson River School painters Asher B. Durand and Robert Seldon Duncanson and early American portraits by Baltimore artists Joshua Johnson and Alfred Jacob Miller.