Eleven Fascinating Acquisitions That Joined the Smithsonian’s Vast Collections in 2024

Each year, the Smithsonian Institution—the world’s largest museum, education and research complex—grows in its holdings, one fascinating object after another.

The highest-profile additions to the Smithsonian in 2024, garnering headlines worldwide, were the two giant pandas that arrived in October. Bao Li and Qing Bao will make their public debut, with some fanfare and expected crowds, on January 24, 2025, filling an 11-month void of no pandas at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.

The new pandas are not a permanent acquisition at all, but a loan—part of a complicated diplomatic ten-year agreement that includes a $1 million annual fee to China for conservation efforts.

But the Smithsonian made many notable 2024 acquisitions throughout its 21 museums, from a glistening 71-million-year-old ammonite fossil to a towering rocket that blasted its billionaire owner into space and back.

Here are some of the highlights from the new additions to various Smithsonian museums this year.

A glittering ancient shell

Ancient ancestors to modern cephalopods, ammonites are extinct, spiral-shaped shelled marine animals dating to the Cretaceous Period. And their fossils are far from dusty and dull-colored. The shells of ammonites shine in iridescent red, blue, orange and green caused by reflection of light from the layers of aragonite and eons of pressure. With a finish like mother of pearl or opal, ammonites have been mined, cut and polished into gemstones called ammolite. This specimen, a platter-sized 71-million-year-old Placenticeras meeki specimen, 26 inches across, was found in Alberta, Canada, and now shines in the Hall of Geology, Gems and Minerals at the National Museum of Natural History.

The first photo of a first lady

The earliest known photograph of an American first lady was purchased by the National Portrait Gallery in June. It depicts Dolley Madison, the wife of James Madison, the fourth president of the United States, who helped shape the expected roles and duties of first lady. The 1846 daguerreotype, which captured her in her 70s, is by photographer John Plumbe Jr., who would also create the earliest extant image of the U.S. Capitol in 1846. The acquisition “will provide the Smithsonian another opportunity to tell a more robust American story and illuminate the vital role women like Madison have played in the nation’s progress,” said Lonnie G. Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian, in a statement. It joins the museum’s vast collection of other early portraits, including an 1843 daguerreotype of the sixth president, John Quincy Adams, in what is believed to be the earliest photograph of a U.S. president.

A contemporary piece made with Yoruba tradition

The National Museum of African Art acquired Sola Olulode’s recent piece Stitched to You, a work that makes contemporary the historic Yoruba textile traditions of adire wax and tie-resist dyeing. The museum notes that part of Olulode’s practice is “to celebrate expressions of intimacy, tenderness and joy among Black queer women” and nonbinary people. “I think I just create images of things I love to see in life, and that is mainly scenes of intimacy and declarations of all kinds of love,” the British Nigerian artist has said. In 2025, Stitched to You will be a part of the exhibition “Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art,” opening at the museum in May.

A familiar outfit from a popular TV show

The sleek blue leather jacket and police badge, worn by Mariska Hargitay in TV’s longest-running live-action series in prime time, “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” was added to the collection at the National Museum of American History. Hargitay, who has portrayed Captain Olivia Benson for 25 years, says the donation of items from the popular show transcends the entertainment industry and relates to her advocacy and support for sexual assault and abuse survivors, which has included testimony before Congress. “It is my profound hope that what is being enshrined here with this donation is the act of listening—the act of paying deep and purposeful attention to survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse,” Hargitay said at the donation ceremony.

A trove of contemporary Chinese photographs

After an eye-opening exhibition on contemporary Chinese photography closed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden last January, 141 of its works were formally acquired as a gift from the collector Larry Warsh. “For us, it’s transformative,” Betsy Johnson, who curated the exhibition, said of the gift during its run. The works from “A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China,” which included pieces from between 1993 and 2022, highlighted images from a place “very underrepresented in our photography collection currently,” Johnson said.

An early marionette from a beloved D.C. artist

Alma Thomas is remembered chiefly for the colorful abstract paintings she began creating in the 1960s after retiring from an over three-decade career as a junior high art teacher in Washington, D.C. But when teaching, Thomas had a particular interest in marionettes. According to the Frist Art Museum, “Her 1934 master’s thesis focused on using marionettes as a ‘correlating activity’ to integrate lessons in anatomy, design principles, electrical engineering, history, language arts, music, sewing and woodworking.” One of her marionettes was acquired this year by the Anacostia Community Museum, where it joins several other marionettes by another Washington educator, William Buckner.

A group of Indian textiles sent to Indonesia

Textiles were important in trade from India to Indonesia in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the most prized came from Gujarat, the weaving capital of northwestern India. A 16-foot-long ceremonial double ikat textile with rich colors and complex design, featuring giant elephants on a royal hunt, is one of three acquired in 2024 by the National Museum of Asian Art. These textiles were cherished as precious heirlooms and passed down through families over generations in Indonesia.

A bulletproof brooch with a message

The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York dedicated an entire exhibition earlier this year to the works that helped build its collection. “Acquired! Shaping the National Design Collection” displayed more than 150 examples from its collection of over 215,000 objects. Included in the exhibition was one of its most recent acquisitions, a black brooch that is also bulletproof, as if meant to protect the heart. Made of ballistic Kevlar with velvet leaves, it was created by designer Tobias Wong in 2004, an era of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The object is emblematic of the playful but provocative work of the Canadian designer, who died in 2010 at 35.

A trove of Italian postage stamps (and some fakes)

Master stamp forgers Jean de Sperati and François Fournier, who considered themselves artists, were often celebrated in the stamp collecting community that was fooled by their creations. Their works are among the large collection given to the National Postal Museum by Joseph Geraci, an internationally known collector who was also a museum employee before his death in 2020. His collection, formed over more than 50 years, represents the finest collection of Italian states philately outside of Italy, according to Carrie Villar, the museum’s chief curator. It also includes other groupings from the U.S. and Europe, including the famous fakes.

A painting by a Harlem Renaissance artist

Aaron Douglas, who used visual art to explore African American experiences, became a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and ’30s. Midwestern-born, he created a distinctive style that used silhouettes and flat planes, as well as an array of Art Deco-derived design. The Smithsonian American Art Museum this year acquired his 1967 oil-on-canvas piece Inspiration. Completed the year after his retirement as head of the Fisk University art department after nearly 30 years, it draws on one of the murals he made for Fisk, depicting a rising golden sun surrounding a determined figure with a book.

The rocket that took Bezos to space

Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, took its creator on a ride for its first crewed flight in 2021. Now that craft, the New Shepard rocket booster, and the First Step crew capsule have been given to the National Air and Space Museum. “There is no better final landing pad for New Shepard than the Smithsonian,” Bezos said in a statement. Named after astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to travel into space, the 39-foot-long and about 36-ton rocket booster and its sleek crew capsule have carried dozens of paying customers to the edge of space in the past few years, among them “Star Trek” star William Shatner, who became at the time the oldest person in space at 90. The rocket and capsule will be installed for public viewing when newly renovated galleries open at the museum in 2026.

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Washington, D.C. freelancer Roger Catlin has written about the arts for AARP The Magazine, The Washington Post and other outlets. He writes mostly about TV on his blog rogercatlin.com.