Homelands

Homelands brings together twenty works from the National Gallery of Art’s collection to explore how artists understand the relationship between people and place. Personal histories of migration, displacement and belonging are placed alongside broader questions of ancestry, national identity and cultural memory.

Artists approach homeland not as a fixed geographical category but as something shaped by movement and change. Some works reflect on pressures that force individuals and communities to leave one place for another; others examine inherited connections to distant territories or the emotional meaning attached to familiar landscapes.

Featuring modern and contemporary practices across different generations, the exhibition presents American society as a network of overlapping histories rather than a singular national narrative. It asks how ideas of home are constructed through memory, family, politics and lived experience.