Negotiating the Nation through Art Collection and Exhibition: The Met’s American Wing at 100
by Anna Köhler
In November 1922, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the addition “of a wing to be devoted entirely to American art of the Colonial, Revolutionary, and Early Republican periods” (Robinson 1922). A gift from the Met’s president, Robert W. de Forest, and his wife Emily Johnston de Forest, the deeply patriotic American Wing was to “teach the present and future generations of our people that the men to whose struggles they owe the foundation of the American Commonwealth were refined in their taste” (Robinson 1922). It opened to the public in November 1924, an anniversary the museum currently thematizes with a reinstallation of the American Wing exhibitions that aims to “inspire fresh dialogues that deepen understandings of American art, history, and culture” (Metropolitan Museum of Art).
Clearly, American Wing staff recognize the centennial not merely as an occasion to celebrate, but to critically reflect on its institutional history. Having visited the Met last fall, I am doing the same here: After outlining the founding of the American Wing and the ideological forces behind it, I am exploring how the Met has since worked to grapple with and extend its original perspective. The self-reflexive anniversary reinstallations highlight the Met’s use of art collecting and display in continuously (re-)negotiating national history and identity.
American Decorative Arts and Nation Building
Art, especially American art, was not a priority for early American collectors. The practical use of studying the natural resources of the newly settled land was more urgent. Not until the late nineteenth century did large-scale art museums start to appear in the United States, with the Met’s formal establishment in 1870 commonly cited as a foundational moment (Alexander 1987: 30; Wittlin 1970: 116-21). The philanthropic art museums of the late nineteenth century, mostly funded by Protestant elites and in cooperation with local governments, adopted a Ruskinian notion of “high culture” as a civilizing influence from Europe. The art displayed was also predominantly European, since a tradition of American art had not yet been formulated, whereas a history and classification of European art was firmly established, with classical and Renaissance works celebrated as touchstones of cultural achievement (Duncan 1995: 49-54).
By the turn of the twentieth century, American decorative arts were held in rather low esteem due to their perceived lack of aesthetic value. As objects of nostalgia, however, they gained significance in a nascent historical preservation movement that was concerned with maintaining buildings associated with the foundation of the nation (Kaplan 1982: 45). Such commemorative thrusts also prompted the Met’s extension toward American decorative arts. For the state-wide Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, the Met decided “to test out the question whether American domestic art was worthy of a place in an art museum” (Robert de Forest qtd. in Heckscher 2012: 161). The positive reception of the loan exhibition of early American furniture and household art, presented by the museum as part of the celebration, induced Met staff to begin acquiring American decorative arts dating from before 1815 (Pilgrim 1978: 11).

Exterior of the American Wing in 1925.
To display furniture and other decorative arts evocatively, the Met’s board decided to follow an innovative mode of exhibition gaining popularity in Scandinavia and central Europe, the room arrangement. The idea was to create a setting that presented objects in a “lived” context rather than isolated types (Pilgrim 1978: 5-7, 12). Thus, a separate wing was built to accommodate colonial and early republic period rooms displaying historic house interiors and decorative art pieces. It would be accessed from the European decorative arts galleries, suggesting that American expressions grew out of European traditions. Its exterior incorporated the marble façade of the Branch Bank of the United States which de Forest acquired in 1915. The driving force behind selecting and arranging the rooms was R. T. H. Halsey, chairman of the Committee on American Decorative Arts and a passionate collector who had lent furniture to the Hudson-Fulton exhibition (Heckscher 2012: 162-5).
Halsey had been born into a wealthy family that proudly traced its arrival to the colonies back to 1630 (Kaplan 1982: 44-6). His writing about the art on display in the American Wing is permeated with a sense of insecurity about its aesthetic value, supplementing what might be lacking in artistic achievement with an emphasis on its historical significance. In his book The Homes of our Ancestors (originally published in 1925), Halsey states: “No claim is made that colonial art is great art. From the art standpoint it cannot be compared with that of Raphael, Michael Angelo, Cellini” (Halsey and Tower 1946: xxii-xxiii). The “lesson” that the installations offered was not based on artistic grounds but on “the human side” of the exhibition: The American Wing was framed as “representative of the homes of men . . . by whose efforts and sacrifices the Republic was made possible” (ibid.: xxi).
The American Wing, then, was created to commemorate national history, and to transfer historical and moral value onto the artistic expressions of early Americans. The “simple elegance” colonial and revolutionary craftsmen produced stood as evidence of “the mental attitude of our people; they lack the pomp and splendor of the Old World” (ibid.: 238). Assistant secretary Henry Watson Kent similarly claimed that the exhibits gave an impression of the historical context in which these craftsmen worked, making the spectator appreciate the objects’ modesty: “the results were without pretentiousness. Appropriateness to use, simplicity, and excellent workmanship, all highly admirable qualities, characterize the products, which were suitable to the character of the people who used them” (Kent 1922: 11). By devoting a new building entirely to the display of early American arts and crafts, the Met contributed to their initiation into the art historical canon against a backdrop of an ever-increasing industrialization and mass production. Halsey and Kent worked tirelessly to formulate a notion of “a national style in art” (ibid.: 11), on which contemporary craftsmen should proudly draw in their work.
Moreover, defining a national art tradition and highlighting the historical context of the objects on display represented a tool for the assimilation of the stream of immigrants that nativists like Halsey and Kent perceived as a threat:
There is another reason for the injecting of so much American history into a book on The Homes of Our Ancestors, as shown in the American Wing. Traditions are one of the integral assets of a nation . . . Many of our people are not cognizant of our traditions and the principles for which our fathers struggled and died. The tremendous changes in the character of our nation, and the influx of foreign ideas utterly at variance with those held by the men who gave us the Republic, threaten and, unless checked, may shake its foundations (Halsey and Tower 1946: xxii).
1924 was not only the year of the American Wing’s opening, but also the year in which the National Origins Act was passed to restrict immigration. Both reflected a fear of immigrants dissolving the memory of the Revolution and foundational ideals of the nation, a history and ideals the American Wing served to idealize and celebrate, preserve and make tangible (Kaplan 1982: 48-50).
Rethinking the American Wing and Celebrating the Centennial
Described in a guidebook as “a living organism, with its collections and their means of display continually evolving” (O’Neill 2001: vi), the wing has undergone substantial changes since 1924. In 1980, it was re-opened as the extended “new Wing,” now fully incorporated into the museum by enclosing the space between the two buildings in a glass courtyard. New picture galleries and an open-storage area on the mezzanine floor were added at the same time (Heckscher 2012: 174). With its last major update in 2012, American Wing staff began rethinking the meaning of the designation American Wing, aiming to transition from the British-American focus of its founding to a more hemispheric perspective. This included, for instance, hiring Ronda Kasl as the Met’s first curator of Latin American art. The Wing’s current curator in charge, Sylvia Yount, joined the Met in 2014 and has since been outspoken about the need to reflect on and communicate its nativist origins (Adamson 2024). Commendable action has been taken since then. In 2018, the American Wing opened its new permanent exhibition Art of Native America, which included the Met’s first land acknowledgement to the Lenape diaspora. The exhibition was reinstalled in 2021 by the Met’s first full-time curator of Native American art, Patricia Marroquin Norby, which included the addition of a plaque on the museum’s Fifth Avenue façade that took the land acknowledgement to the Met’s main entrance (Yount and Norby 2021).
The period rooms remain a core component of the American Wing. However, these galleries have also undergone changes, and new rooms have been added. The Frank Lloyd Wright Room, taken from the living room of a Prairie-style house in Minnesota and installed at the Met since 1982, for instance, extends the collection into the twentieth century (O’Neill 2001: 108). More significant in the project of broadening the wing’s perspective is the 2021 addition of the Afrofuturist period room Before Yesterday We Could Fly. Envisaging a home in Seneca Village, a largely black nineteenth-century community that was razed to allocate space for the construction of Central Park, this gallery reflects on period rooms as forms of museum display. It rejects the notion of historical periodization in favor of the imaginative force of Afrofuturism and highlights that creating period room displays always involves a degree of fabrication, presenting both pieces from the Met’s historical collections and recent commissions.
Yount cites Before Yesterday We Could Fly as pointing toward the reinterpretation of the rooms that American Wing staff envisioned for the centennial (Adamson 2024). As she explains in the twenty-four-minute video introducing The American Wing at 100 on the Met’s website, the anniversary represented an occasion for contemplating “how the collection has evolved,” acknowledging that the “American Wing was founded during a really extraordinary colonial revival zeitgeist” with a narrow view on American history and identity that has broadened over time. Thus, the major components of the centennial reinterpretation are a reinstallation of the Wing’s founding collection of eighteenth-century furniture, and the juxtaposition of “iconic” pieces of American Wing collections with others that complicate them. This technique of juxtaposition effectively captured my attention when I visited the American Wing with the intention of viewing paintings by the Peale family. In the period room known as the Alexandria Ballroom, I was struck by a recent acquisition that hung right across John Trumbull’s famous 1780 full-length portrait of George Washington.
The Alexandria Ballroom, George Washington, and Titus Kaphar’s William “Billy” Lee: Portrait in Tar
The Alexandria Ballroom is one of the original fifteen period rooms that made up the American Wing in 1924. Currently installed in gallery 719, it now serves as a relatively subtle backdrop for the display of eighteenth-century furniture and portraiture of the Revolutionary period. Possibly the most illustrative example of the American Wing founders’ concern with historic association over artistic achievement, it consists of a large amount of white wall space beside its two paneled chimney breasts, curved doors, low wainscot, and suspended musicians’ balcony. Though assistant curator Durr Friedley wrote that the room’s design “ranks with the best” when he was scouting historic interiors, it was “the historical connection with Washington and Lafayette [that added] to its interest as a Museum specimen” (qtd. in Gallagher) and moved the Met to purchase the room’s woodwork in 1917.

The Alexandria Ballroom as installed at the Met in 1924.
It was translocated from Gadsby’s Tavern in Alexandria, Virginia, which was a significant coach-stop on the north-to-south Atlantic route. Gadsby’s was a fashionable meeting place for Virginia gentry and political elites. Located less than ten miles from Mount Vernon, George Washington patronized the birthnight balls put on there in his honor in 1798 and 1799. Additionally, Thomas Jefferson held his inaugural banquet at Gadsby’s ballroom in 1801, and the Marquis de Lafayette was entertained there during his 1824 return to the United States (Gallagher). Halsey’s chapter on the Alexandria Ballroom in The Homes of Our Ancestors only gets to the room’s decorative details after a six-page narrative in which he images Lafayette reminiscing about his late friend on his visit:
As the glasses clinked to ‘our late illustrious neighbor and fellow citizen, George Washington’, the Marquis perhaps pictured his old friend arriving at the inn for the ball . . . Although Washington never danced after 1781, Lafayette imagined him at the birthnight ball, settled in a corner surrounded with admiring company, enjoying the spectacle (Halsey and Tower 1946: 97-100).
In its recorded historic associations with key revolutionary figures revered by American Wing founders, the room perfectly fit into its initial mission of “reviv[ing] those memories . . . so invaluable in the Americanization of many of our people, to whom much of our history is little known” (ibid.: xxii). Perhaps more overtly than other rooms, the Alexandria Ballroom immerses visitors in a nostalgic representation of the nation’s founding period with a wealth of patriotic iconography.

Charles Willson Peale’s monumental portrait George Washington (ca. 1779-81) as installed in the Alexandria Ballroom in 2024.
In the arrangement that I saw last fall, the room displayed mostly eighteenth-century chairs and portraits of Washington. My first impression was that it seemed like a shrine to the first president: Charles Willson Peale’s massive 2,5 x 1,5-meter portrait was facing me as I entered the room, surrounded with smaller portraits by John Trumbull, Gilbert Stuart, and mementoes like jugs, coins, clocks, and pins, also bearing Washington’s likeness. This heroizing mode of display was only challenged when I turned around to see an evidently more contemporary painting hung right beside the doorway through which I entered. It was also a portrait, but not of Washington. In fact, I could not see the sitter’s face, as it was covered in black.
Struck by this portrait, I stepped closer. The painting in question is Titus Kaphar’s 2016 work William “Billy” Lee: Portrait in Tar. The portrait sitter, then, is William Lee, who was enslaved at Mount Vernon and George Washington’s valet. Crucially, Kaphar’s work is not a historical portrait. Lee never sat for a portrait like his master did. One of his few existing historical depictions actually hung right beside Kaphar’s imagined portrait in the Alexandria Ballroom: We can see a representation of William Lee on the right-hand side of John Trumbull’s 1780 portrait of Washington standing above the Hudson River. Washington, dressed in almost all-white underneath his coat, is standing in an upright pose with a glowing piece of sky behind him. Lee, in orientalist fashions, stands off to the right in a dark corner, looking to Washington while tending to the general’s horse.

Titus Kaphar’s William “Billy” Lee: Portrait in Tar (2016) hung beside John Trumbull‘s George Washington (1780) in the Alexandria Ballroom in 2024.
Kaphar explains in the museum audioguide that he became “obsessed with Trumbull” in graduate school, where he realized that “these paintings are historical fictions. They are constructs composed for the purpose of telling a very specific story about this country.” He thus embraced this imaginative freedom to reframe Lee as the subject sitting for his own portrait, a position he was denied during his lifetime. However, Kaphar draws attention to the gaps, omissions, and erasure of canonized historical memory, including visual culture. We do not know what Lee looked like – probably not like the type on the margin of Trumbull’s painting. His face is thus left to our imagination and covered by tar – “pure blackness” in Kaphar’s interpretation. Kaphar made it his artistic mission to fight for the remembrance of black figures that are largely forgotten or misrepresented by institutional histories and to add their images to our collective imagination, drawing attention to nationalistic myth-making along the way.
In the Alexandria Ballroom, Kaphar’s painting breaks with an otherwise glorifying visual rhetoric. It makes viewers remember that, beside war hero, founding father, and first president, Washington was also an enslaver who depended on the forced labor of black people. Additionally, it highlights the role black figures like Lee played in the nation’s founding. Just by including this one painting, the story presented within the Alexandria Ballroom became infinitely more compelling to me. I wish Kaphar’s painting was not hung in a corner I would not have seen if I had just taken a straight walk through the gallery, and that it was not the only piece taking on this important work. Yet, it certainly is one example of the American Wing staff accomplishing their vision of complicating “iconic” pieces from the historic collections, and broadening the perspective on American art and history.
Under the leadership of Sylvia Yount, the Met American Wing has started to take considerable steps to broaden its understandings of American art and to reflect on its role as one of the premier institutions defining the very notion in the last ten years. With the reinstallations for its one hundredth anniversary, it has started to reckon with its own history, honoring its foundational collections while – or perhaps by – drawing attention to narratives previously untold. Tracing these developments demonstrates how institutions of arts and culture function as spaces of national identity-shaping and that the interpretation of the past is always renegotiated according to the demands and power relations of the present.
About the Author
Anna Köhler is a PhD candidate at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. Within the research training group “Authority and Trust,” her dissertation project investigates the emergence of the museum as a “high culture” institution in the US in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. She received her B.A. and M.A. in museum studies and English/American studies from the University of Würzburg. Her research interests include cultural memory studies, visual culture, museum history and theory, and the history of science and knowledge.
Contact: akoehler@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
Works Cited
Adamson, Glenn. 2024. “The Wing at 100.” The Magazine Antiques. April 29. https://www.themagazineantiques.com/article/the-wing-at-100/.
Alexander, Edward P. 1987. Museums in Motion. An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums. Nashville: American Association for State and Local History.
Duncan, Carol. 1995. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge.
Gallagher, Moira. N.d. “Alexandria Ballroom.” Metropolitan Museum of Art. Accessed May 8, 2025. https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/collection-areas/the-american-wing/period-rooms/alexandria-ballroom.
Halsey, R. T. H., and Elizabeth Tower. 1946. The Homes of Our Ancestors. As shown in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Garden City: Doubleday & Company.
Heckscher, Morrison H. 2012. “The American Wing Rooms in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Winterthur Portfolio 46 (2): 161-78.
Kaplan, Wendy. 1982. “R. T. H. Halsey: An Ideology of Collecting American Decorative Arts.” Winterthur Portfolio 17 (1): 43-53.
Kent, Henry Watson. 1922. “Our Native Craftsmen.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 17 (11): 10-11.
Metropolitan Museum of Art. N.d. “The American Wing at 100.” Accessed April 28, 2025. https://www.metmuseum.org/de/exhibitions/the-american-wing-at-100.
O’Neill, John, ed. 2001. A Walk Through the American Wing. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Pilgrim, Dianne H. 1978. “Inherited from the Past: The American Period Room.” The American Art Journal 10 (1): 4-23.
Robinson, Edward. 1922. “A Wing Devoted to American Art.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 17 (11): 3.
Wittlin, Alma. 1970. Museums: in Search of a Usable Future. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Yount, Sylvia, and Patricia Marroquin Norby. 2021. “This Is Lenapehoking.” Metropolitan Museum of Art. May 12. https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/this-is-lenapehoking.
Images
Figure 1/Header: Charles Engelhard Court, American Wing, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2024. Photographed by the author.
Figure 2: Exterior of American Wing in 1925, incorporating the façade of the Branch Bank of the United States. Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/339876.
Figure 3: The Alexandria Ballroom as installed at the Met in 1924. Halsey, R. T. H., and Charles O. Cornelius. 1924. A Handbook of the American Wing Opening Exhibition. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll10/id/128498.
Figure 4: Chales Willson Peale’s monumental portrait George Washington (ca. 1779-81) as installed in the Alexandria Ballroom in 2024. Photographed by the author.
Figure 5: Titus Kaphar’s William “Billy” Lee: Portrait in Tar (2016) hung beside John Trumbull‘s George Washington(1780) in the Alexandria Ballroom in 2024. Photographed by the author.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Anna Köhler (June 4, 2025). Negotiating the Nation through Art Collection and Exhibition: The Met’s American Wing at 100. HCA Graduate Blog. Retrieved June 10, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14203
