WASHINGTON, DC.- “Much Here Is Beautiful: Photography Surveys of the U.S. Bicentennial” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum brings together, for the first time, photography surveys that capture an expansive and evocative portrait of America in the years surrounding the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial. From the California coast to the Kansas heartland to the streets of New York City, the exhibition features images taken across the country by more than 70 photographers as part of the federally funded Surveys Grant Program. Bringing together 225 photographs, “Much Here Is Beautiful” places the Bicentennial images within the broader legacy of federal survey photography dating back to the 19th century and its lasting impact on generations of artists. “Much Here Is Beautiful” is the culmination of years of research, drawing on the museum’s rich photography holdings and uncovering U.S. Bicentennial survey photographs held in collections nationwide, revealing new discoveries and previously unseen works.

The exhibition, organized by John Jacob, the McEvoy Family Senior Curator for Photography and Krystle Stricklin, assistant curator of photography, is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum from Friday, Sept. 18, to Sunday, April 18, 2027.

“Since its inception, the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s photography program has been dedicated to collecting and preserving work that reflects the lived experiences of Americans,” said Jane Carpenter-Rock, deputy director for museum content and outreach at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “Marking the United States’ 250th anniversary, ‘Much Here Is Beautiful’ underscores the museum’s ongoing commitment to stewarding and interpreting images of the nation, ensuring they remain vital to our understanding of our past and ourselves.”

To celebrate the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) created a grant program to fund a series of regional photographic projects that documented people and places across the country. Inspired by the legacy of the Farm Security Administration’s (FSA) photographs during the Great Depression, the NEA envisioned these surveys as a new portrait of the United States during a pivotal chapter in its history. Lasting from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, the NEA funded 72 photo surveys, yielding thousands of pictures taken by more than 200 photographers. ​

In 1983, 1,000 photographs by NEA grant recipients were transferred to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Among the material received by the museum were prints from 13 of the survey projects, as well as an archive of related documents and ephemera covering the entire grant program. Showcasing a variety of subjects, formats and geographies, “Much Here Is Beautiful” explores the range of surveys funded by the NEA.





“Together, these images present a view of the U.S. from within, as artists turned their cameras toward their own communities with urgency and personal vision,” Jacob said. “At a moment when photography was in transition, the photography surveys of the U.S. Bicentennial affirmed its power to shape how we see the world—and ourselves within it.”

“This exhibition makes an incredible range of photographic material newly accessible to the public, much of which has not been comprehensively revisited since the grants were originally administered,” Stricklin said. “By bringing these surveys into a contemporary context—and situating them within the rich tradition of federal survey photography—we hope audiences will gain a deeper appreciation for its important role and impact on the medium.”

“Much Here Is Beautiful” opens with an introduction to the history of federal survey photography leading up to the U.S. Bicentennial. It includes works from the museum’s collection by Carleton E. Watkins, William Bell, Timothy O’Sullivan and William H. Jackson, produced as part of the 19th-century U.S. Geological Survey, which brought images of the West to many Americans for the first time. Also featured are photographs from the FSA program of the 1930s and 1940s, which demonstrate photography’s transition to documenting all aspects of American life in the 20th century, including works by celebrated photographers Marion Post Wolcott, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee and John Collier.

The exhibition organizes the U.S. Bicentennial surveys into four geographic sections:

• The Northeast, featuring images by Lee Friedlander, who focused on the factories and laborers of industrial towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The section also includes Bruce Davidson’s acclaimed “Subway” series depicting New York City in the 1980s, alongside a photographic survey of East Baltimore led by Elinor Cahn, Joan Clark Netherwood and Linda Rich.

• The South, debuting never-before-seen images by Robert Townsend Jones Jr. of Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, during a major transition period, developed from negatives that were discovered through curatorial research. This section also includes Martin Stupich’s documentation of the construction of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) and photographs from Appalachian communities of West Virginia and Kentucky.

• The Midwest, showcasing images by Joel Meyerowitz that record the look and spirit of St. Louis, dominated by Eero Saarinen’s monumental sculpture “The Gateway Arch.” This section also features large-scale projections of John Margolies’ photographs of roadside attraction, capturing the motels, diners, gas stations and quintessentially American oddities that defined the landscape.

• The West, including works that were part of the “The Rephotographic Survey Project” by photographers Mark Klett and JoAnn Verburg, shown alongside prints of the original landscape images captured by Carleton E. Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan a century earlier. Also featured are photographs by Reagan Louie chronicling San Francisco’s Chinatown, a neighborhood imbued with the artist’s personal and ancestral memories, as well as a selection of works from Penny Wolin’s “Jackalopes, Cowboys and Coal Mines: A Photographic Survey of Wyoming.”

The title of the exhibition comes from the poem “American Journal” (1978) by Robert Hayden, who was the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1976 to 1978, a role today known as U.S. Poet Laureate.