The Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery will both reopen this weekend following six years of renovation, and where once the two institutions shared a building but not a mission, they have been redesigned to function together. “A proliferation of offices and interior walls that once narrowed viewing space are gone, giving way to floor plans that sweep visitors from one museum to the other and back again… As they collaborate to tell America’s story through ideas and ideals, one conveys it thematically, the other through portraiture, each celebrating the complex forces and figures that have shaped the country since pre-Colonial times.”