The Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building, Washington, DC Photo: Dzhoy Zuckerman, via Wikimedia Commons
The Smithsonian Institution’s board of regents will meet later this month to discuss housing the new National Museum of the American Latino inside the historic Arts and Industries Building on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
According to Robin Pogrebin of The New York Times, opening the museum in a pre-existing building would bypass the need for congressional approval—and avoid a political battle with President Donald Trump’s administration. The meeting is scheduled to take place on 31 August.
The Arts and Industries Building, located between the Smithsonian Castle and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, was designed by the architects Adolf Cluss and Paul Schulze and opened in 1881. The second-oldest building on the National Mall—after the Castle, completed in 1855—it hosted president James A. Garfield’s inaugural ball the year it opened. Several months later, it opened to the public as the US’s first national museum.
Starting in the early 1900s, the Smithsonian’s ever-growing collections began migrating from the building to specially built thematic museums around the Mall—the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of American History and the National Air and Space Museum among them. The Arts and Industries Building was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1971, but it fell into disrepair over the decades. It was closed to the public in 2004. In 2006, it appeared on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s annual list of the US’s most endangered historic places.
More than 20 years of restoration work on the Arts and Industries Building have taken place in fits and starts, largely as a result of funding issues. The building opens to the public only occasionally for special exhibitions and events. It is currently open but will close on 7 September for additional renovations. A completion date for the ongoing restoration project has not been announced.
In 2022, the Arts and Industries Building appeared on a shortlist of potential sites for both the National Museum of the American Latino and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum—the two projects were approved by congress and signed off on by Trump during his first term in 2020. Plans had since moved on in favour of constructing new, specially designed buildings for the pair of upcoming museums.
In May 2026, however, the women’s history museum hit a major hurdle when a congressional bill finalising its future site on the Mall was struck down in the US House of Representatives. Last-minute additions to the bill had sought to exclude trans women from its programming and to create a loophole for president Trump to override the location if he wanted.
The Latino museum has also been the subject of recent political battles. In 2023, the exhibition ¡Presente! A Latino History of the United States caused a stir among Republicans who saw it as devoting too much space to European colonialism and US military interventions in Latin America, and not enough to denouncing left-wing authoritarians like Fidel Castro.
In May of this year—as the drama around the woman’s history museum was unfolding—Trump filed a budget request to congress that cancelled funding for the Latino museum in favour of a roaming “Smithsonian Latino Center” that would create programming for the Smithsonian’s existing network of museums.
Given these recent developments, it comes to no surprise that the Smithsonian’s leadership may be seeking its own congressional carveout—strategically timed to just before several of its regents’ terms are set to expire. (The Smithsonian did not respond to a request for comment.) Predictably, Republicans are not happy with this development.
“The Smithsonian Institution is trying to use a loophole to sneak in a building for a yet-to-be-built controversial museum that remains homeless,” writes the Washington Examiner’s Mike Gonzalez, who broke the story in an opinion piece on Thursday (20 August). “It is an act of desperation by a museum complex beset with accusations of bias.”
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