In the 1970s, the U.S. Commissioned Photographers to Document the Country’s People and Places. You Can Now See More Than 200 of the Powerful Images

At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a “national portrait” reveals what the United States looked like during its bicentennial period

Kayla Randall | Digital Editor, Museums

October 13, 2026 7:00 a.m.

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In “American Journal,” poet Robert Hayden calls the nation “an organism that changes even as I examine it.” Hayden wrote the poem in 1976, the same year that he became the first Black American consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a role that would later be known as the U.S. poet laureate. A couple years later, “American Journal” was published in a poetry collection of the same name.

Born and raised in Detroit, Hayden chose to write the piece as though he were an extraterrestrial visiting the United States from another world to study the country and then report back to his planet.

In America, he writes, there is “much grandiloquence,” “much buying and selling,” “much violence” and “much that repels.”

But, he writes of the country’s landscapes, from its mountains to its canyons, “much here is beautiful.” That line became crucial for the curators at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, who chose to make it the title of their newest exhibition.

“Much Here Is Beautiful: Photography Surveys of the U​.​S. Bicentennial,” open now through April 18, 2027, features more than 200 images that showcase America’s people and places. The pictures are drawn from the photography program funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to commemorate America’s 200th birthday in 1976.

Over a multiyear period, the agency supported 72 projects that produced thousands of photos from hundreds of photographers, some known and some unsung, around the country. The agency’s aim was to create an archive of American imagery, photographic surveys of the land and its inhabitants around the time of the bicentennial. “Today, 50 years later,” writes former New York Times photography critic Andy Grundberg, the survey program “has been nearly forgotten.” The Smithsonian is remembering it with this showcase.

In the early 1980s, the NEA transferred prints from several of the surveys—about 1,000 photos—to the Smithsonian after the program ended. The recently unveiled exhibition, co-curated by the museum’s John Jacob and Krystle Stricklin, brings together a selection of the survey images for the first time. Much like the NEA projects themselves, the photography on display spans geographically across the entire nation.

The photos are often striking in their ability to reveal America as a home—to people and animals, to cities, plains and rock formations. Photographer Robert K. Hower shows a family full of happy faces on the Fourth of July in 1976 Kentucky. In 1979 Wyoming, an Australian cattle dog stares through a fence under a dreamy blue sky with scattered white clouds, photographed by Penny Wolin.

In another Wolin image from that year, Dolly Parton smiles brightly, dimples showing, ahead of her Cheyenne Frontier Days debut. Also in 1979, Kenneth McGowan captures a moment in California: an impeccably dressed woman pumping gas into a shiny blue car. The next year, in Washington State, Emmet Gowin documents the devastation wrought by the freshly erupted Mount St. Helens, the landscape barren as the cratered volcano looms in the distance.

Altogether, these surveys made “a national portrait,” says Jacob, the co-curator. The endeavor is an example of how federal support for the arts can make “an incredible impact,” Stricklin adds.

Prior to organizing the exhibition, the curators were excited by pictures from three Baltimore photographers, Elinor Cahn, Joan Clark Netherwood and Linda Rich, whose work had been funded by the NEA bicentennial grant.

Cahn, Netherwood and Rich captured everyday, local life in their individual photography, from Baltimoreans gathered at a joyous outdoor Independence Day celebration to portraits of fellow Marylanders at home and at work.

Jacob had joined the museum’s curatorial staff in 2015. When he looked through the NEA materials, he found that the Baltimore photographers, who were unknown to him, had produced “really great work,” he says. “And so, at some point, I proposed doing a small exhibition of that work to dig deeper into it … and that sort of launched this process.” In 2021, the exhibition, called “Welcome Home: A Portrait of East Baltimore, 1975-1980,” opened at the museum.

When she saw the catalog, Stricklin remembers, she was “just so taken by the incredible work of these three women I’d never heard of, this project I’d never heard of.” She later began working with Jacob and conducted a two-year deep dive of the NEA materials.

“The East Baltimore show was something about photographs we love, but it was also really a model for us of what we would need to do if we were able to do this larger show,” Jacob says.

Five years after the “Welcome Home” exhibition opened, that larger show is here, linked to its predecessor by also featuring pictures by the Baltimore photographers.

At the outset of the bicentennial, the NEA saw the surveys as a way to answer the question: What does America look like? According to Stricklin, it was a nation in transition.

“There was this real desire, I think, to document change within communities and cities,” she notes. “You’ll see a survey that was done in Atlanta that is all about documenting how the city was changing because of the building of the new MARTA rail system there. There’s a survey that was done in Memphis that’s all about the changes that were happening to Beale Street as buildings were being destroyed and others were being rebuilt.”

The curators look forward to visitors being able to see their regions and lives reflected through the photography. (About half of the nation’s states are represented in the photos on view.) That’s part of what Jacob and Stricklin loved about the material.

“People are going to relate, particularly, to the geographies that they’re from,” Stricklin says. “We’ve witnessed people going in and saying, ‘Oh, I’m from Wisconsin, where’s the Wisconsin survey?’”

Southern Wisconsin is indeed represented, as are so many other snapshots of American life—from sunny Long Beach, California, to vibrant Miami Beach, Florida.

While the images spread throughout the gallery delight and captivate viewers, they also serve as historical documents that chronicle the landscapes of bygone eras.

The exhibition had no title for a while, as it was hard to encapsulate everything the survey program attempted to do, Stricklin notes. When she was researching the bicentennial, she came across Hayden’s poem. Upon reading the line “much here is beautiful,” it stood out to her. The curators felt that the photographers and those who envisioned the NEA projects were painting a picture of the big, multifaceted, complex country, just as Hayden did. It was an appropriate title. Additionally, she says, “It’s just a beautiful turn of phrase.”

Kayla Randall is Smithsonian magazine's digital editor, museums.