Luce Foundation Center for American Art

You could spend all day looking at art in the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture while hardly setting foot in a gallery.

Part of that is because of the Lunder Conservation Center, a unique facility that allows museumgoers to watch staff conservators from both museums at work preserving and restoring objects from the museums' collections. But it's mainly thanks to the Luce Foundation Center for American Art, Washington's first visible art storage facility and study center. Part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Luce center almost single-handedly quintuples the amount of the museum's collection on public view. Sure, there may be roughly 940 art objects hanging in SAAM's galleries. Give or take, there are an additional 3,300 on chockablock, salon-style display at the Luce, in 64 secure glass cases that evoke a Victorian library.

The center's mission fits in nicely with the theme, touted by both museums' directors, of raising, rather than answering, questions. Why, for instance, did curators choose to display the handful of paintings by William H. Johnson that are on view in the galleries -- and not one of the more than 25 on view in the Luce?

Organized by category (craft, 20th-century painting, sculpture, etc.) it's a place where obscure oddities hang cheek-by-jowl with the extraordinary. Several Albert Pinkham Ryders, drawn from the museum's collection (the largest in the world), supplement the artist's paintings on view in the museum's second-floor galleries, along with works by Honore Sharrer, Paul Cadmus, Sam Gilliam, Romaine Brooks and a host of others both well-known, hardly known and anonymous. Works by area glass artist Tim Tate and ceramicist Margaret Boozer round out the myriad objects representing the craft collection of the Renwick Gallery.