At the Smithsonian, America’s story is being told one book at a time
A newly opened exhibition turns artists’ books into a compact survey of identity, migration, language, memory and belonging — and asks what changes when a book is not merely read, but built, folded, woven and handled as art.
The exhibition’s most radical idea is also its simplest: a national story does not have to arrive as a single, authoritative volume.
“American Stories: Artists’ Books from Smithsonian Libraries and Archives” opened Oct. 8 on the first floor of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Smithsonian materials describe more than 50 artists’ books drawn from its library and archival collections, ranging from one-of-a-kind objects to works by established names such as Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper and Ed Ruscha, alongside newer acquisitions by contemporary artists.
The timing matters. The show arrives during the United States’ 250th-anniversary year, when museums across the country are wrestling with a familiar question in newly public ways: how do you compress a sprawling, contradictory nation into a story that people can actually see themselves inside? “American Stories” answers not with one master narrative, but with dozens of small physical objects — pages, folds, fibers, pop-ups, photographs, prints and bindings — that make the act of storytelling visible.
A book can be an object, a sequence and an argument
Most museum visitors know how to look at a painting and how to read a conventional book. An artist’s book sits awkwardly — and productively — between those habits. Smithsonian Libraries and Archives defines the form broadly as art that uses the structure or function of the book as its medium. The artistic decision may live in the printing, paper, binding, sequence, shape, scale or material. Some works resemble ordinary publications at first glance. Others open like sculptures, unfold into architectural forms or abandon traditional pages altogether.
That ambiguity is the point. A conventional book usually asks the reader to move through text in a stable order. An artist’s book can make the sequence itself carry meaning. A page turn can become a reveal. A fold can conceal one image while exposing another. A sewn binding can suggest repair, ancestry or constraint. A pop-up can make an idea physically rise from the page. The object can be intimate enough to hold in two hands, yet conceptually expansive enough to contain a migration story, a family memory, an environmental warning or a critique of who gets included in history.
The Smithsonian’s own history of the medium points to the 20th century as the period when the book increasingly became an art object in its own right. In the United States, Ed Ruscha’s early books helped establish the form’s conceptual possibilities by presenting serial photographs in deliberately plain, portable formats. Other artists moved in the opposite direction, making labor-intensive editions or singular hand-built works. The category grew wide enough to include photography, printmaking, poetry, graphic design, sculpture and experimental publishing.
“American Stories” uses that tension to its advantage. Visitors do not encounter a neutral container filled with information. They encounter evidence that every historical account is shaped: by what is included, what is left out, what material is chosen, how a story is ordered and what the viewer is allowed to see at once. That makes the exhibition especially well suited to a year dominated by public conversation about American memory.
Identity becomes material: woven pages, collage, pop-up forms and monuments in miniature
The Smithsonian’s exhibition page highlights several works that show just how differently artists can approach the same basic object. Babette Katz’s My Flag from 1995 uses illustrations to imagine people working together and eventually becoming the stars of the American flag. The work turns a familiar national symbol into a process rather than a fixed icon: the flag is something constructed through human participation.
Aimee Lee’s Vocabulary Lessons from 2023 approaches belonging through language. The Smithsonian says Lee plays with English and Korean words while reflecting on the experience of learning a new language. Pages from old sketchbooks were transformed into paper threads and woven into a foundation for new words. The method matters as much as the subject. Old language is not simply discarded; it is cut, reworked and made into the physical support for what comes next.
America, Guests Who Came to Dinner (and Stayed)
Evelyn Patricia Terry’s 2021 collaged books use prints, paint and hair to address the many routes by which people have come to the United States — including choice, necessity and force.
Golden Lotus
Colette Fu’s 2022 work uses a pop-up lotus, X-ray imagery and photographs to examine the history of foot binding in China and the physical scale imposed by that practice.
The Mollusk
Amy Richard’s 2018 shell-shaped book, made from handmade paper, connects a sculptural book form to the ecological role of mollusks and the need to care for the natural world.
Mother Monument
Holly Trostle Brigham’s 2018 work honors women artists who influenced her, pairing images and poetry inside an obelisk-like form that turns personal influence into a monument.
These are not variations on one style. They are variations on what a book can do. One artist can use a national flag as an evolving metaphor; another can use the physical act of weaving to describe language learning; another can turn collage into a record of migration. The medium is flexible enough to carry both public questions and intensely private experiences.
In America’s 250th year, the small scale of these books feels deliberate
Elsewhere in the National Museum of American History, the scale of the semiquincentennial is intentionally enormous. The museum’s “In Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness” exhibition spreads 250 objects across the building’s three public floors and 250,000 square feet, using artifacts from the 1700s to the present to explore how Americans have pursued the promises of the Declaration of Independence. The Smithsonian’s broader “Our Shared Future: 250” initiative likewise spans museums, programs and communities across the country.
“American Stories” works differently. Instead of enlarging the national story, it makes it intimate. A visitor must often look closely. The relevant evidence may be the edge of a page, the grain of paper, the relationship between two materials or the way an object opens. That scale encourages a different kind of historical attention: not “What is the story of America?” in the singular, but “Who is telling this story, from where, with what materials, and to whom?”
The national symbol becomes a process
That is one reason Katz’s My Flag is an effective entry point. The Smithsonian’s description emphasizes the challenge and joy of people working together to weave a national story. In a 250th-anniversary year, that framing shifts attention from inherited symbolism toward participation.
A flag may look fixed. A national narrative is not. It is continuously assembled from individual lives, institutions, conflicts, migrations, memories and acts of interpretation.
The Smithsonian’s October program notes also say the exhibition includes works connected to Native Hawaiian culture, a Louisiana community’s rituals as a hurricane approaches, and an artist’s heritage expressed through African and American fabrics. Those examples widen the show beyond a narrow definition of “American” as a single region, ethnicity or visual tradition. The nation appears instead as a network of local practices and inherited cultures that overlap without becoming identical.
That plural approach does not make history easier. It makes it more accurate to lived experience. National identity is rarely encountered as an abstract textbook chapter. It is encountered in a household, a school, a neighborhood, a language, a storm season, a family story, a fabric pattern or a public symbol. Artists’ books are unusually good at preserving those intermediate scales between the individual and the nation.
Why the physical book still matters in a screen-first culture
There is an obvious paradox in mounting a major exhibition about books in 2026. Americans increasingly encounter text through phones, tablets and laptops. Digital reading is frictionless by design: a page can be enlarged, copied, searched, shared and replaced without changing the device that displays it. An artist’s book often depends on the opposite experience. Weight matters. Thickness matters. The hinge matters. The direction of a fold matters. A material can carry cultural or emotional meaning that disappears when it becomes a flat image on a screen.
This is not an argument against digital access. Digitization is essential for research, preservation and broad public visibility, and the Smithsonian makes collection information searchable online. But the artist’s book exposes what a digital surrogate cannot fully reproduce. A screen can show an image of handmade paper; it cannot make the viewer feel the scale of the fibers or understand how a stiff sheet resists the hand. A photograph can document a pop-up; it cannot recreate the small mechanical surprise of the structure rising as the book opens.
The order of pages can control suspense, repetition, memory or contradiction. Meaning accumulates over time rather than appearing all at once.
Paper, textile, hair, ink, photographs, thread and sculptural elements can carry cultural associations that ordinary printed text does not.
A tiny book asks for intimacy; an expanding structure can make the reader physically reposition. Size changes the relationship between object and viewer.
The Smithsonian’s artists’ book collection exists across several libraries, and the collecting logic changes with the institution. The American Art and Portrait Gallery Library emphasizes works that contribute to an “American Story,” including handmade, limited-edition, autobiographical and conceptual books. The Cooper Hewitt library is especially interested in paper engineering and construction features such as movable parts and spinning discs. Other Smithsonian libraries hold works connected to science, technology and specialized fields. The result is less a single shelf than a distributed archive of what happens when artists treat publishing as a medium.
Slow down: the exhibition rewards attention to structure, not just subject
A useful way to approach “American Stories” is to resist the urge to treat each object as an illustrated essay. Start with construction. Is the work bound like a familiar book, or does it behave more like a sculpture? Can you see stitching, hinges or layered paper? Does the material look industrial, domestic, fragile, recycled or ceremonial? Then consider sequence. Even when a book is displayed open to a single spread, imagine what the unseen pages may be doing before and after that moment.
Next, notice the relationship between personal and public history. The most distinctive works often begin with a specific experience — learning a language, tracing heritage, remembering a community, honoring artistic predecessors — and then create a structure that lets the viewer connect that experience to a larger social story. That movement from intimate to national is central to the exhibition’s title. “American Stories” is plural on purpose.
Read the object before the label
Look at scale, materials, binding and shape. Ask what kind of physical behavior the work invites: turning, unfolding, peering, circling, opening or comparing.
Look for what changes across pages
Repetition can build rhythm; altered materials can mark a shift in place, identity or time. The sequence is often part of the argument.
Connect the small story to the larger one
Ask why this experience belongs in a national history museum. The answer may be migration, citizenship, labor, environment, language, family or memory rather than a famous date.
There is also value in accepting the frustration built into the display. Books are sequential, but exhibitions can usually show only a fraction of a book at once. Fragile materials may limit how long a particular page is exposed to light. A visitor may leave having seen only one position of an object designed to change. That incompleteness is not a failure so much as a reminder that no exhibition can make an archive fully present. It can only open a path into it.
One floor holds intimate books; another holds the machinery of national memory
The context around “American Stories” is unusually rich this fall. The museum is still running its large 250th-anniversary exhibition, “In Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness,” through the end of 2026. That museum-wide project uses 250 objects to trace how Americans have pursued — and contested — the ideals associated with the Declaration of Independence. The building also contains the Star-Spangled Banner and the 1776 gunboat Philadelphia, a Revolutionary War vessel now undergoing a public conservation project.
That creates an illuminating contrast for visitors who see both. The gunboat is monumental, singular and unmistakably historic. The artist’s book is often portable, intimate and personal. Yet both are historical evidence. One carries the marks of battle and preservation; the other may carry the marks of stitching, cutting, folding and memory. One announces its national significance through scale and age; the other may reveal national significance only after close reading.
The juxtaposition also clarifies what museums do beyond preserving famous objects. A national collection is a machine for deciding what deserves long-term attention. By placing artists’ books inside the National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian is not treating them as decorative supplements to “real” history. It is treating bookmaking, personal narrative and material experimentation as ways Americans have recorded experience and argued with inherited stories.
The practical details — and why a repeat visit may be worthwhile
The exhibition is in the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives Gallery on the first floor, west wing, of the National Museum of American History on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Smithsonian visitor information lists the museum as open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., except Dec. 25. Admission is free and passes are not required. The Smithsonian currently describes “American Stories” as ongoing rather than publishing a fixed closing date on its main exhibition listings.
Visit at a glance
Because the exhibition is about small, detail-heavy objects, it makes sense to build in more time than the gallery footprint may suggest.
Visitors who are especially interested in the form may also want to explore the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives’ online artists’ book collection afterward. The online catalog cannot reproduce the tactile experience, but it can extend a museum visit by revealing how broad the holdings are and by making individual records easier to revisit. Researchers can also request access to works held by particular Smithsonian libraries by appointment.
America at 250 does not need one definitive story. It needs better ways to hold many stories at once.
The strongest idea in “American Stories” is not that every experience is equivalent or that history should dissolve into isolated personal memories. It is that form matters. A nation this large cannot be represented only through monumental objects, presidential documents or canonical images. Those are indispensable, but they are not sufficient.
Artists’ books make room for the smaller architectures of belonging: the words someone struggles to learn, the materials a family carries forward, the rituals a community repeats before a storm, the inherited symbols people remake for themselves. In a year of grand anniversaries, that modest scale is a useful corrective. It reminds us that national history is not only what happened in public. It is also what people chose to preserve, bind, fold, weave and pass on.
What stays with you after the gallery
A conventional history book often promises completeness. Its spine implies that the story is contained between two covers. An artist’s book tends to undermine that confidence. The object may be handmade, partial, fragile, nonlinear or impossible to display all at once. It draws attention to the choices that turn experience into record.
That makes “American Stories” an unexpectedly fitting exhibition for 2026. The United States is marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, but no anniversary can settle what the country means or whose memories define it. The more useful task is to learn how to look at the stories already around us — especially the ones expressed through unfamiliar forms.
Leave the gallery and the most memorable question may be the one embedded in the Smithsonian’s own introduction to the show: how would you tell your story? The interesting part is not only what you would say. It is what form you would choose — what you would cut, save, stitch together, hide, repeat or place in someone else’s hands.
Quick questions
What exactly is an artist’s book?
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives describes it as an art form that uses the structure or function of a book as the medium. The artistic idea can live in materials, binding, layout, printing, sequence, scale or sculptural construction — not only in written content.
Is “American Stories” a book exhibition or an art exhibition?
It is both. The objects are books, but they are also artworks. That hybrid identity is central to the medium and explains why artists’ books appear in both museum and library collections.
Does the exhibition only feature famous artists?
No. Smithsonian materials say the show mixes recent acquisitions by contemporary artists with works by established figures including Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper and Ed Ruscha, as well as one-of-a-kind pieces found only in Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.
Is admission required?
No. The National Museum of American History lists admission as free, with no passes required. Regular museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily, except Dec. 25.
How does the exhibition connect to America’s 250th anniversary?
It opened during the Smithsonian’s broad 2026 semiquincentennial programming and inside a museum filled with anniversary exhibitions. Its focus on personal, collective and national histories offers a smaller-scale counterpoint to the institution’s large America 250 displays.
Sources and further reading
- National Museum of American History — “American Stories” exhibition page
- Smithsonian Libraries and Archives — “American Stories: Artists’ Books”
- National Museum of American History — October 2026 exhibitions and events calendar
- Smithsonian Libraries and Archives — “What is an artist’s book?”
- Smithsonian Libraries and Archives — Artists’ Books collection overview
- Smithsonian Institution — “Our Shared Future: 250”
- National Museum of American History — “In Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness”
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