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William Costin
After Washington, D.C. was established as the nation’s capital, Black people found themselves in a precarious position. While some individuals entered the city as enslaved labor for the white elite, there was also a rapidly growing free Black population. This community continued to expand as many enslaved people were manumitted by their enslavers and other free Black people mi
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Ulysses S. Grant's Cabinet
On March 4, 1869, Ulysses S. Grant took the oath of office and became the eighteenth President of the United States. His inauguration was a joyful occasion—many Americans celebrated Grant as the military hero that defeated the Confederacy. After Andrew Johnson’s dismal administration, Americans welcomed Grant’s election as an opportunity to restore the glory and honor of the presidency.The Gr
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Diversity in White House Art: Alma Thomas
On October 14, 2016, First Lady Michelle Obama hosted a reception celebrating the recent renovation of the Old Family Dining Room, located on the State Floor of the White House. After welcoming her guests, Mrs. Obama delivered remarks about the space, including the addition of twentieth-century abstract artwork by diverse artists: As many of you know, the President and I, we are
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Diversity in White House Art: Greta Kempton
Greta Kempton (born Martha Greta Kempton) was born in 1903 in Vienna, Austria. She discovered painting early on, completing her first painting at the age of nine—a portrait of her sleeping governess. Kempton studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and the Vienna National Academy of Design before emigrating to the United States in 1926 with her young daughter, Daisy. In
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Diversity in White House Art: Henry Ossawa Tanner
Henry Ossawa Tanner was one of the most distinguished Black artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Despite his immense success, Tanner’s life story reveals the challenges faced by many Black artists. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on June 21, 1859. His mother, Sarah Tanner, was a formerly enslaved woman who escaped to freedom on the Underground Railroad, while his fa
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Diversity in White House Art: Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe’s captivating flower paintings and Southwestern landscapes have made her one of the world’s most recognizable modern artists. O’Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, and raised in Wisconsin. Throughout her childhood, she took art lessons at home with her siblings and later attended lessons at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Virgi
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Diversity in White House Art: Simmie Knox
On June 14, 2004, the official portraits of President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton were unveiled in the East Room of the White House. These paintings made history as the first official White House portraits created by a Black artist, Simmie Knox.
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Gilbert Stuart
Gilbert Stuart is one of the most famous portraitists in American history, best known for his unfinished Athenaeum depiction of President George Washington. Gilbert Stuart was born in Saunderstown, Rhode Island on December 3, 1755, the youngest of three children. His family moved to Newport, Rhode Island a few years later, and Stuart began painting as a teenager. He initially studied under
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Diversity in White House Art: Isamu Noguchi
Isamu Noguchi was one of the most innovative and prolific sculptors of the twentieth century. He was born on November 17, 1904 in Los Angeles, California, to an American mother and a Japanese father and spent most of his childhood in Japan. When he was thirteen, his mother sent him to Indiana to receive an American education.1After graduating from high school,
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Slave Patrols in the President's Neighborhood
Thomas Smallwood detailed the circumstances of his enslavement and life as a free Black man living in Washington City in his autobiography published in 1851. As a result of laws preventing enslaved people from learning to read and write, firsthand accounts such as these are both rare and important to reference while reconstructing the history of slavery in the President’s Ne
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Native American Delegations, Diplomacy, and Protests at the White House
Thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, the formation of the United States, and construction of the White House, Native peoples such as the Piscataway and Nacostines lived and prospered in the region of what is now Washington, D.C. As more colonists descended upon the area, they seized lands from Native Americans—including the land between the Potomac Ri
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Harriet Lane
Most Americans have never heard of Harriet Lane, but at the time of her uncle James Buchanan’s presidency, she was the White House hostess, a friend to Queen Victoria, namesake to “societies, ships of war, [and] neck-ties,” “First Lady of the Land,” and a national celebrity.1 How, then, have Americans forgotten her?