Get ready, Washington — a powerful new chapter of American visual history is coming to the National Gallery of Art. This November 7, the museum opens Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography, a landmark exhibition celebrating how Black Americans embraced the camera as a tool of identity, dignity, and self-expression in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The show brings together nearly 70 rare photographs — many on public view for the very first time — drawn largely from the Ross J. Kelbaugh Collection, acquired by the Gallery in 2023. Through fragile daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, and albumen prints, visitors will meet soldiers in uniform, families in their finest clothes, and Red Cross nurses, each portrait a quiet act of resistance against the stereotypes of the era. The exhibition takes its name from a hand-colored tintype from about 1860, inscribed “Remember Me, Annie.”
Organized in three sections, the exhibition honors pioneering Black photographers such as James Presley Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge, and Augustus Washington, who built thriving portrait studios as early as the 1840s and 1850s and proudly signed their work. It also celebrates the rise of Black-owned studios later in the century, with images by artists like Addison Scurlock and James Van Der Zee. Remember Me runs November 7, 2026 through March 14, 2027 on the Ground Floor of the West Building, and — as always at the National Gallery — admission is completely free.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
