Visionaries and Stewards

For fifty years, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) has fostered new scholarship through its residential fellowship program, the oldest and largest in the world for the study of American art. This essay chronicles the program’s growth, probes its prehistory, and introduces Smithsonian figures key to its formation and development. It argues that SAAM’s program emerged from the confluence of three factors: the Smithsonian’s long-standing commitment to national education and research, a new institutional investment in the arts and humanities beginning at midcentury, and the strategic appointment of several Smithsonian leaders and administrators between 1964 and 1970. On the golden anniversary of the program’s founding in 2020, this introduction and the commentaries that follow it engage with the newly created SAAM fellowship archive to reflect on this institutional milestone. Using historical records and ephemera, authors for this iteration of Collaboration2 commemorate and critically assess the SAAM fellowship program’s history and influence on the greater field of American art.