Featuring nearly 80 artworks spanning the 17th century to the present, these newly reinterpreted galleries reframe The Museum’s historical American art collection to foreground slavery and Black and Indigenous history.

With 13 new artworks by contemporary artists of color in dialogue with the historical collection, Seeing America centers often-overlooked subjects and critical perspectives. Painting and sculpture—including colonial era portraiture, neo-classical sculpture, and Hudson River School painting—are placed in context with historic photographs, objects of daily use, and site-specific contemporary art.

Presented with fully bilingual English and Spanish labels and a series of new American Voices community labels.

Long‑Term Installations

  • From European Colonies to a New Nation
  • Power Portraits (learn more about Leon Morton’s Freedom Portraits)
  • American Folk and Self-Taught Art
  • The Politics of Representation
  • The Rise of Landscape Painting
  • Black Artists Taking Authorship
  • Hidden in Plain Sight: Slavery in Newark
  • The Transatlantic Slave Trade
  • Enslaved Labor in the Americas

Ron Norsworthy, The New Room (Allegory no. 3), 2021. Mixed media on panel, 46 × 55 in. (116.8 × 139.7 cm). Purchase 2022 Contemporary Art Society of Great Britain Fund | 2022.3 © 2021 Ron Norsworthy 

Wendy Red Star, Indian Woman Sitting, 2005. Pigment print, 31 x 21 in. (78.74 x 53.34 cm). Purchase 2023 Helen McMahon Brady Cutting Fund | 2023.1 © Wendy Red Star 

Alberto Henschel, Portrait of a black Brazilian woman standing with a basket of fruit on her head, 1867‑1875. Carte de visite, 4 x 2 7/16 in. (10.1 x 6.2 cm). Gift of Emma M. Von Seyfried in memory of her parents, 1941 | 41.596 

Leon Morton, Frederick Douglass, 2022, from the series Freedom Word Portraits. Algorithmic digital drawing, 26 ½ x 26 ½ in. (67.31 x 67.31 cm) Purchase 2023 Helen McMahon Brady Cutting Fund | 2023.2 © Leon Morton