Exhibitions
Investigate American history through decorative arts in the DAR Museum’s changing and permanent exhibits.
The Main Gallery
Current Exhibit:
Sewn in America: Making, Meaning, Memory
March 22 to December 31, 2024
Study Gallery
Examine over 600 objects in the collection up close in this newly renovated space. Perfect for researchers and those who want to see all the details!
The Yochim Gallery
This decorative arts gallery with regularly rotating exhibits is located on the lower level of Memorial Continental Hall.
Period Rooms
The 31 period rooms at the DAR Museum tell the story of the American domestic interior. The rooms date from the 1690s through the 1930s. Reflecting how people furnished their houses, the rooms illustrate a wide range of cultures and regional differences.
Online Exhibits
Upcoming Exhibition
Fighting for Freedom: Black Craftspeople and the Pursuit for Independence
Opens March 29, 2025
The Revolutionary War serves as a testament to the forging of the United States of America and the embodiment of ideas and principles pertaining to liberation and sovereignty. While often overshadowed, African Americans played a central role in attaining such values as realities in America. Their participation during the Revolutionary War serves as a perfect vignette to observe the long journey towards a unified and independent nation. The purpose of this exhibition is to highlight the creations, contributions, and legacies of African Americans as they fought for freedom during the midst of the American Revolution and beyond. At times the war was unified and inseparable. In contrast, other vignettes display people struggling to break free from oppression while their oppressors also wrestled with ideas of liberty.
While covering the Revolutionary period, Fighting for Freedom spans beyond those war years of the Revolution, as African Americans sought explicit realities of liberty through craft well into the 19th and early 20th centuries with the underpinning idea of African American craft as a catalyst for freedom-seeking which displays itself in a host of ways. This exhibition intends to encompass African American crafts of furniture, metals (silver), paintings, textiles, tools, and the assortment of other objects connected to African American craft. A collaborative exhibition between the DAR Museum and the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive.