America at 250, told in the shape of a book
The Smithsonian’s new “American Stories” exhibition puts artists’ books at the center of a national conversation about identity, memory and who gets to tell the American story.
“American Stories: Artists’ Books from Smithsonian Libraries and Archives” opens Thursday, Oct. 8, inside the National Museum of American History in Washington. The exhibition gathers works by more than 50 American artists and treats the book not simply as a vessel for words, but as a physical medium that can fold, unfold, sequence, conceal, repeat, memorialize and argue.
That choice matters in 2026. The United States has spent the year marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with ceremonies, exhibitions and public history projects. The National Museum of American History has mounted a building-wide presentation of 250 objects across roughly 250,000 square feet. Against that scale, “American Stories” offers a different proposition: a nation can also be encountered page by page, through personal memory, community ritual and forms small enough to hold in two hands.
The exhibition’s official framing is deliberately broad. It centers identity, community and history, bringing recent acquisitions by emerging contemporary artists into the same conversation as works by established figures including Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper and Ed Ruscha. Some objects are one of a kind; others come from traditions of limited editions and conceptual publishing. Together, they make the case that the format of a book can be as expressive as the language printed inside it.
A book you do not merely read
The Smithsonian defines an artist’s book as a work of art that uses the structure or function of a book as inspiration. That can sound simple until you meet the objects themselves. Some still resemble conventional codices with covers, spines and pages. Others expand into accordion folds, emerge from boxes, turn on hinges, layer transparencies, combine photographs with handwork or ask the viewer to understand sequence as a form of movement.
The medium sits at the crossroads of printmaking, photography, poetry, graphic design, sculpture and publishing. The Smithsonian’s broader artists’ books holdings stretch from the early 20th century to the present and are distributed across several of its research libraries. The American Art and Portrait Gallery Library, for example, collects artist-made books that contribute to the “American Story,” while other branches emphasize design, science or African art. That network helps explain why a museum exhibition about books can range so widely without feeling like a shelf of illustrated volumes.
The form also changes the pace of looking. A painting usually announces itself at once. A book is temporal: the viewer encounters one spread, one fold or one compartment before the next. Even when an exhibition display prevents a visitor from physically turning pages, the idea of succession remains embedded in the object. You read with your eyes, but also with your sense of time, scale and touch.
Meaning accumulates through page order, repetition, pause and reveal.
The book can behave like sculpture, box, map, foldout or portable installation.
Some works circulate in multiples; others exist as a single handmade object.
Photographs, documents, fabric and found material can become a record of lived experience.
A national story built from plural pages
The strongest clue to the exhibition’s ambitions is in its range of subjects. Smithsonian Libraries and Archives says the show includes a work commemorating Native Hawaiian culture, another that follows the rituals of a Louisiana community as a hurricane approaches, and a work in which an artist celebrates her heritage through African and American fabrics. These are not footnotes to a single national narrative; they are examples of how national identity is assembled from local histories, inherited materials and communities under pressure.
That approach is especially visible in Babette Katz’s My Flag from 1995, the work the Smithsonian has used to introduce the exhibition online. In the institution’s description, Katz’s illustrations evoke the challenges and joys of people working together to weave a national story, with the figures eventually transformed into stars on the American flag. The symbolism is legible, but the book form complicates it. A flag normally arrives as a finished emblem. A book exposes process: there is a before, a during and an after.
For visitors, that difference is worth lingering over. Museums of American history are full of objects that have already become icons: flags, uniforms, vehicles, campaign artifacts, household goods, tools and documents. Artists’ books occupy a less settled zone. They can behave like testimony without being documentary evidence, or like monuments without requiring monumental scale. Their intimacy makes room for ambivalence, memory and contradiction.
Native Hawaiian culture
The exhibition includes a work described by the Smithsonian as a commemoration of Native Hawaiian culture, placing a specific living culture inside the larger American frame rather than treating geography as background scenery.
Louisiana before a storm
A community’s preparations as a hurricane rolls in become a story about routine, vulnerability and the social knowledge that accumulates around recurring risk.
African and American fabrics
Textile can carry ancestry, movement and belonging. When fabric enters a book, material itself becomes a kind of language alongside image and sequence.
A flag made through people
My Flag frames national symbolism as the outcome of people working together, a fitting example of how this show uses familiar forms to stage less familiar questions.
The 250th anniversary is not just a celebration; it is a test of how a country remembers
Anniversary years tend to reward large gestures. The 2026 semiquincentennial has brought a surge of exhibitions, festivals, public programs and commemorations across the Smithsonian. That scale is understandable: 250 years invite timelines, landmark artifacts and sweeping summaries. Yet a milestone can also flatten history if every story is made to serve a single triumphant arc.
Artists’ books resist that flattening almost by design. Their structures encourage detours. A foldout can place two moments side by side. A repeated image can turn an ordinary scene into evidence. A handmade binding can insist that labor is part of the story. A box can make concealment and discovery physical. The format often privileges point of view rather than institutional authority.
This is what makes the new exhibition a useful companion to the museum’s bigger 250th-anniversary programming. The building-wide “In Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness” is organized around the promises of the Declaration of Independence and uses iconic and everyday objects to trace how Americans have pursued those ideals. “American Stories” shifts the question from ideals to narration: who tells the story, in what material, through what sequence, and from which community?
That distinction is important because national memory is never only about what is preserved. It is also about the format preservation takes. A cannon, a desk, a flag and a handmade book all ask viewers to trust different kinds of evidence. The best museum visits happen when those forms are allowed to disagree with one another rather than being reduced to illustrations of the same conclusion.
LeWitt, Piper and Ruscha show how wide the field can be
The exhibition mixes emerging contemporary artists with established figures, and the Smithsonian specifically names Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper and Ed Ruscha among those represented. Their presence gives visitors three useful points of entry into the broader history of artists’ books, even though the exhibition is not organized as a survey of celebrity names.
Sol LeWitt
LeWitt treated books as a natural extension of conceptual art: sequences, grids and serial structures could become complete works in themselves. Smithsonian Libraries has long highlighted his bookmaking as part of the medium’s early U.S. history.
Adrian Piper
Piper’s practice joins conceptual art with philosophy and sustained examination of race, identity, class and social behavior. The Smithsonian’s holdings include artist-book and book-based works that bring those concerns into an intimate reading format.
Ed Ruscha
Ruscha helped make the modest, serially photographed book a central form in postwar American art. His book work demonstrated that repetition and ordinary subjects could become a visual argument without the scale of a gallery wall.
For visitors who do not follow contemporary art, these names should not become a checklist. The more rewarding move is to use them as proof that a book can be a serious artistic medium and then give equal attention to the recent acquisitions and lesser-known makers around them. “American Stories” is explicitly structured to put established and emerging artists in the same field of view.
Five things worth watching for in the gallery
Artist’s books can initially feel difficult because they borrow familiar book architecture but do not always behave like familiar reading. A simple viewing strategy helps. Start with the object before the subject, then move from construction to sequence to context.
Notice whether the work opens like a codex, stretches outward, stacks, nests or resists opening altogether. Construction is often an argument about how information should be encountered.
Look for repetition, interruption and blank space. An artist can make the viewer rush, pause, backtrack or anticipate a reveal without using a conventional narrative.
Paper weight, cloth, thread, photography, found objects and printing methods are not decoration. They can signal labor, place, family history, commerce or fragility.
A one-of-a-kind handmade volume carries a different social life from a book printed in hundreds of copies. Artists’ books can be intimate objects, democratic multiples or both.
Ask what you cannot see. Museum cases necessarily freeze objects that were designed to be handled or unfolded. The gap between the whole work and the visible spread is part of the viewing experience.
A practical way to pair the exhibition with the rest of the museum
Because “American Stories” occupies the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives Gallery on the first floor west, it can work either as a focused stop or as the quiet center of a longer American-history day. A useful route is to see the artist’s books first, then move outward into the museum’s larger 250th-anniversary presentation. That order lets the intimate objects set questions that the monumental ones must answer.
Look closely
Spend the first pass noticing construction, materials and sequencing before reading every label. Pick three works that use the book form in clearly different ways.
Build a dialogue
After the artist’s books, choose a few objects from “In Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness.” Compare how an official artifact and an artist-made object frame similar ideas differently.
Follow one theme
Trace a theme such as migration, labor, citizenship, community or material culture across multiple galleries rather than trying to “complete” the museum.
This approach also protects against museum fatigue. The National Museum of American History holds millions of objects, and its 2026 anniversary programming is intentionally expansive. A thematic route can be more meaningful than racing from one famous artifact to another. The artist’s books are especially suited to that slower pace because their details reward close viewing.
Why small, strange books belong in a national history museum
A history museum usually promises evidence: the actual object was there, belonged to someone, survived something, did something or came from a particular moment. An artist’s book offers a different kind of truth. It may not prove an event happened. Instead, it records how a person or community understood an event, a place, an inheritance or a conflict.
That is not a lesser form of history. It is the history of interpretation itself. Nations are made not only through laws and wars but through stories people repeat, images they preserve, rituals they inherit and materials they choose to represent themselves. Artists’ books make those choices unusually visible because the object’s structure cannot hide behind a neutral page. Every fold is a decision. Every sequence establishes a relationship. Every binding says what belongs together.
For the United States at 250, that may be the exhibition’s most useful contribution. A milestone encourages the fantasy that history can be summarized. A library teaches the opposite: there is always another volume, another perspective and another method of organizing the evidence. “American Stories” turns that library logic into a public gallery experience.
The result is not a single portrait of America. It is a set of containers for many portraits, some polished and some unresolved. Visitors who arrive expecting books may leave thinking more carefully about monuments, archives and even flags. Visitors who arrive expecting national history may discover that a page can be a landscape, a textile can be an argument and a binding can be a theory of belonging.
Sources and further reading
- Smithsonian Libraries and Archives — “American Stories: Artists’ Books from Smithsonian Libraries and Archives”
- Smithsonian Institution — 2026 Libraries and Archives programming announcement
- Smithsonian Libraries — Artists’ Books Collection overview
- National Museum of American History — “In Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness”
- National Museum of American History — visitor information
- National Museum of American History — security and visitor policies
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