Collection

You can now view a selection of items from our Collection online through our CatalogIt hub. View selected items from the Swedish American Museum’s permanent collection of about 10,000 artifacts and 300 linear feet of archival material. Explore photographs, household items, and more incredible objects that represent a piece of the immigration journey. View items that are on display in our core exhibit, We Are America, along with other objects that are part of our permanent collection.

Explore the Collection

Collection Highlight

Hand-carved figurine by C.O. Trygg, 1969. Accession #2025.18.23.
Gift of Charles Hogren and Anne Hogren Woodson.

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About the Collection

Our permanent collection captures the Swedish-American experience in the United States, Chicago, and the Andersonville neighborhood in which the Museum resides.

The Museum’s permanent collection includes:

Archival material documenting the Swedish immigration experience to Chicago
Personal artifacts and material that illuminate the lives and stories of Chicago’s Swedish and Swedish-American residents
Swedish and Swedish-American decorative art
Farming and agricultural implements: machinery as brought here from Sweden or made by the immigrants and their descendants
Folk art which reflects the perspectives of Swedish artists, from the first immigrants to present day
Fine art relevant to the Swedish experience
Artifacts showing the life and work of Chicago area-based Swedish organizations and businesses

We collect artifacts with the aim to preserve the history of Swedish-Americans in Chicago, the Swedish-American immigration story, the story of contemporary Swedish-Americans, the relationship between Swedes and Swedish-Americans, and the history of the Andersonville neighborhood.

New to the permanent collection

Visit our second floor to view the “New to the permanent collection” display case. This display periodically rotates to highlight new additions to the Museum's permanent collection.

Donations

The Museum adds new donations to the collection every year through the generosity of local artists, organizations, and members of the public. When people donate items to our collection, they are entrusting us to honor and preserve their legacy.

While we collect a wide variety of materials related to Swedish-Americans, when accepting donations we are looking for items that will fill existing gaps in our collection and broaden our understanding of the Swedish-American immigration experience. Items which are already well-represented in our collection, such as Bibles and LP records, will generally not be accepted.

If you have items you are interested in donating to the Swedish American Museum, please contact the Curator, Sarah Hawkinson, via email at shawkinson@samac.org describing the item(s) you wish to donate. If you can, please include photographs of the item(s). Please do not send or bring items you wish to donate to the Museum until you have been contacted by Museum staff.

Please refer to the frequently asked questions for additional information on collection donations.
To review our Collections Policy, please click here.

Photo & Organization ID Project

In 2025 and 2026, the Swedish American Museum embarked on a large-scale digitization project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Entitled “Digitizing the Swedish-American Experience in Chicago”, this project has resulted in the digitization, re-housing, metadata correction, and publication of thousands of archival materials from the Swedish American Museum collection. A higher number of archival records are now available for public view via the CatalogIt HUB.

If you recognize a person or location in one of our published photo records, or if you have more information to share about a particular organization, you can share that information with the Museum via this Google Form.

Thank you for helping us enrich our collection!

Share your information here.

Research Appointments

The Museum welcomes researchers, students, scholars, journalists, and the general public to utilize our collection for research and study. The Museum is open to researchers by appointment only. Please contact the Curator, Sarah Hawkinson, via email at shawkinson@samac.org or call the Museum at 773.728.8111 to schedule a time. Please keep in mind that appointment time options will be limited by staff time, staff availability, and the nature of the request. Thank you for your understanding.