The Museum collects and exhibits in the areas of decorative arts, craft, and design. We consider design through the lenses of history, culture, and art. Our work acknowledges and celebrates the power of design.

Black History Month is a time to celebrate the fullness of African American history and culture, but that cannot be contained in one month alone.

Juneteenth is a time to gather as a family, reflect on the past and look to the future. Discover ways to celebrate this African American cultural tradition of music, food and freedom. 

The award-winning original podcast All Music Is Black Music explores how African American music and culture play a central role in the history of American music as told to listeners through artifacts housed within the museum's collection. 

The museum tells the story of the post-Civil War transition of enslaved people to freedom by making the records of the Freedmen’s Bureau accessible online.

The Smithsonian Transcription Center is a pan-Smithsonian website that allows digital volunteers, or “volunpeers,” from around the world to transcribe documents, photograph captions, field books, and other materials online.

The Memory Book is a signature NMAAHC initiative launched with the first version of the NMAAHC website in 2007. Memory Book was conceived as a social network dedicated to collecting the memories and histories of our visitors.

Save Our African American Treasures is a collaboration among cultural institutions, community leaders and the public to preserve and collect African American material culture.

History, Rebellion, and Reconciliation is a series of public programs presented by the Museum examining race, justice, and community activism.

This initiative invites participants to schedule an appointment with the museum's audiovisual conservation team in order to digitize the public's home movies.

The Slave Wrecks Project is designed to combine research, training and education to build new scholarship and knowledge about the study of the global slave trade through the lens of slave shipwrecks.

The Museum and the Library of Congress have produced an invaluable look at the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights History Project provides faces and voices to many of the previously unknown individuals who made valuable contributions to the Civi...

In Slavery’s Wake—Slavery, Freedom, and the Making of Our World, the exhibition will travel to Africa, Europe and the Americas, shifting the way we think about, talk about, and represent the history of slavery, race, and globalization and its contin...

The mission of the Museum’s Oral History Initiative is to document, preserve, and interpret African American stories through the art and practice of oral history.

The Museum is launching Rendering Visible, a digital collecting initiative focused on the creative production of black architects. This initiative will allow the museum to identify architectural illustrations that may be suitable for inclusion in the...

Smithsonian Open Access invites you to discover a world where you can learn, research, explore, and create in ways you couldn’t before.