Lynda Roscoe Hartigan Named Smithsonian American Art Museum Director

The Smithsonian has chosen a director who already knows the Smithsonian American Art Museum from the inside. Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, currently executive director and CEO of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, will become the next Margaret and Terry Stent Director of SAAM on September 8.

Her appointment is both a homecoming and a test. Hartigan spent two decades at SAAM earlier in her career, rising to chief curator and helping build an acquisitions program that broadened the museum's holdings of modern, contemporary, and self-taught art. She also worked extensively with folk art and Black artists, and developed a particular expertise in Joseph Cornell. In 2006, she organized a Cornell survey that traveled to the Peabody Essex Museum, SAAM, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

At the Peabody Essex, Hartigan became the museum's first female director in 2021 after joining the institution in 2003 as chief curator and later serving as deputy director. Her return to Washington comes after a period of leadership turnover at SAAM. Jane Carpenter-Rock has led the museum on an interim basis since September 2024, when Stephanie Stebich was removed as director and reassigned to an advisory role at the Smithsonian Institution.

Hartigan inherits a museum with one of the most important collections of American art in the country, including the nation's largest holdings of New Deal art, a substantial group of American Impressionist and Gilded Age works, and contemporary craft at the Renwick Gallery. The museum reopened its contemporary galleries in 2023 after a two-year closure and a refresh by architect Annabelle Selldorf, with a presentation that expanded the visibility of Latinx, queer, and Native American artists.

That curatorial direction also placed SAAM in the crosshairs of President Trump's March 2025 executive order, which targeted what his administration described as“improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” in Smithsonian museums. The order specifically cited SAAM's exhibition“The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture.” In December, the administration escalated the pressure by threatening to withhold federal funding from the Smithsonian, which accounts for roughly 62 percent of the institution's budget, unless it complied with outstanding document requests tied to a content review.

In announcing the appointment, Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, described Hartigan as a“visionary leader” with a deep commitment to American art, scholarship, and public engagement. Hartigan said she was honored to help shape the museum's next chapters and called SAAM and the Renwick Gallery places where art can encourage meaningful dialogue and connection.

Her arrival gives SAAM a director with institutional memory at a moment when the museum's role in national cultural debate is more visible than ever.

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