This past Memorial Day weekend, I visited the Seattle Art Museum to see the exhibit “American Art: The Stories We Carry.” This is the first major reinstallation of the museum’s American art collection in 15 years.

The exhibition brings the museum’s historical American collection — predominately comprised of works by artists of European descent — into conversation with Native, Asian American, African American, and Latino art, including contemporary art and new acquisitions and commissions.

“The Stories We Carry” is the result of a two-year process and unprecedented collaboration among SAM curators and staff, regional artists and advisers from the Seattle community. Two key goals of the project were to create a new interpretive framework for the American art galleries that bring forward historically excluded narratives and artistic forms and to deepen the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices.

The project began with the question, “What is American art?” SAM’s American art galleries were last substantially reinstalled in 2007 for the opening of the expanded downtown museum, giving preference to the historical American art canon over the many perspectives that have driven cultural production in North America from the 17th century to World War II, particularly those of artists active in the Pacific Northwest region’s diverse communities.

SAM’s historical American art collection contains approximately 2,500 examples of painting, sculpture, works on paper and decorative arts. It features works by nationally renowned and historically significant artists and Pacific Northwest artists long overdue for closer examination within the American context. The reinstallation emphasizes a more critical and intimate approach to the story of American art, in particular how it intersects with the museum’s Native American art collection, which is presented in adjacent galleries.

Each of the galleries has a theme. The first one that visitors enter, Storied Places, fittingly starts with the land itself, exploring diverse approaches to place, nature and the landscape genre. The next theme, Transnational America, explores how North America became part of a global network of ideas, economies and cultures and unearths the histories embedded in objects of migration, trade, and exploration.

The visitor then explores Ancestors + Descendants, which considers the complexities of portraiture — long a dominant American art form — and reveals the multiplicity of American identities. Then the next gallery, Memory Keepers, reflects on different cultural approaches to storytelling, remembering and legacies, with a special focus on the Pacific Northwest region.

In the midst of these galleries is a room with the theme “Reaching Back, Guiding the Future.” Here, three artworks come together in a dramatic challenge to the legacy of structural racism and colonialism in the U.S.

The center of this room is Nicholas Galanin’s commission for SAM, Neon American Anthem (2023), which fills the gallery with white light from a custom neon installation that offers a proclamation and an invitation: “I’ve composed a new American national anthem: Take a knee and scream until you can’t breathe.” Galanin envisions the work as a participatory performance piece that engages museum visitors to ring out with sounds of protest, mourning or celebration.

What I also found in one of the museum’s galleries, dedicated to modern American art, was the narrative series “The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture” by Jacob Lawrence. This collection was featured in an exhibit recently at Larson Gallery in Yakima.

Opened in October 2022, “American Art: The Stories We Carry” will continue with rotating exhibits.