Smithsonian Weighs Housing Latino Museum in 145-Year-Old Arts and Industries Building
The Smithsonian Institution's Board of Regents will meet on 31 August 2026 to discuss placing the new National Museum of the American Latino inside the historic Arts and Industries Building on the National Mall in Washington, DC, The Art Newspaper reported on 21 August.
The strategy carries a sharp political advantage, according to Robin Pogrebin of The New York Times: opening the Latino museum in a building the Smithsonian already owns would bypass the need for congressional approval and sidestep a political fight with President Donald Trump's administration, which proposed zero funding for the project in its budget, Spectrum News reported in August 2025.
The Arts and Industries Building sits between the Smithsonian Castle and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Designed by architects Adolf Cluss and Paul Schulze, it opened in 1881 — the second-oldest building on the Mall after the Castle, completed in 1855. It hosted President James A. Garfield's inaugural ball that same year and opened to the public months later as the United States's first national museum.
Over the following decades, the Smithsonian's growing collections migrated out to newer institutions: the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of American History and the National Air and Space Museum. The building was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1971. It closed to the public in 2004 and landed on the National Trust for Historic Preservation's list of the most endangered historic places in 2006. More than 20 years of restoration work have since proceeded in fits and starts, largely due to funding issues.
The building is currently open for a summer run celebrating the United States' 250th anniversary, but will close again on 7 September 2026 for further renovations. No completion date has been announced.
Congress approved the National Museum of the American Latino and the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum in 2020, with Trump signing the legislation during his first term. The 2020 law creating the Latino museum specified four possible sites — including the Arts and Industries Building — and required a location to be designated by 27 December 2024, NBC News reported. That deadline passed without a final designation. In 2022, the Arts and Industries Building appeared on a shortlist of potential sites for both new museums.
The political climate has only grown more complicated since. In May 2026, a congressional bill finalising the women's history museum's site on the Mall was struck down in the US House of Representatives after last-minute additions sought to exclude trans women from its programming and create a loophole allowing Trump to override the location.
The Latino museum has faced its own political turbulence. A 2023 exhibition, '¡Presente! A Latino History of the United States,' drew criticism from Republicans who argued it devoted too much space to European colonialism and US military interventions in Latin America.
Smithsonian Board of Regents member Xavier Becerra put the case for the museum plainly in 2016: some 57 million Latinos were, he said, 'essentially missing from the National Mall' (The Art Newspaper, 2016).
Whether the Arts and Industries Building becomes the Latino museum's permanent home may hinge on what the Board of Regents decides at its 31 August meeting — and on whether the Smithsonian can finish restoring a building that has spent more years closed than open this century.
