The West as America, Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920 was an art exhibition organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (then known as the National Museum of American Art, or NMAA) in Washington, D.C. in 1991, featuring a large collection of paintings, photographs, and other visual art created during the period from 1820 to 1920 which depicted images and iconography of the American frontier. The goal of the curators of The West as America was to reveal how artists during this period visually revised the conquest of the West in an effort to correspond with a prevailing national ideology that favored Western expansion. By mixing New West historiographical interpretation with Old West art, the curators sought not only to show how these frontier images have defined America