Two archives, queried live.
Every record below comes from The Met or Smithsonian Open Access and was filtered on that archive’s own rights field before it reached this page. 12 shown for “Tin for Madam C. J. Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower” — 40 records examined, 25 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 03:52 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.The Metropolitan Museum of Art: HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. Results from the remaining archive are shown unchanged — nothing is substituted for a source that did not answer.

Tin for Madam C. J. Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower
Artist not stated in the record · 1920s

Tin for Madam C.J. Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower
Artist not stated in the record · 1910s - 1920s

Tin for Madam C.J. Walker's Hair and Scalp Preparation
Artist not stated in the record · 1940s - 1960s

Tin for Madam C. J. Walker's "Tan-Off"
Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, American, founded 1906 · 1920s

Salon Shop Sign
American Art Works · 1920-1970

Tin for Madam Walker Glossine and Pressing Oil
Artist not stated in the record · 1940s - 1960s

Diploma from The Lelia College
Artist not stated in the record · 1916

Business card of Mme. Dovie Wright, hair culturist
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1917

Badge from Madam C.J. Walker convention
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1920s

Badge from the National Convention of Madam C. J. Walker's Agents
Artist not stated in the record · 1917

Business card of Jordan's Beauty Parlor
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1917

Photograph of Madam C.J. Walker
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1912
Where these records came from.
Two archives are wired, and only two. Each one is filtered on its own rights field — never on a title match, and never on the presence of an image file.
- The Met Collection API (Open Access)Rights field:
isPublicDomain. HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. No records from this archive are shown for this query.Unavailable - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 2419765 matched · 40 examined · 25 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.12 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-01 03:52 UTC, during this request. A completed pass is kept for 24 hours and replayed for an identical search, which is what keeps repeated queries inside Smithsonian’s 30-requests-per-hour allowance. A pass in which either archive failed to answer is never kept — an outage must not be replayed as though it were a finding about the catalogue.
Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress are deliberately not wired. Wikimedia was confirmed, on a live query, to return CC-BY material inside the same result set as genuine public domain works, and filtering it safely has not been designed yet. loc.gov was blocked by bot detection during the source evaluation, so its rights vocabulary has never been observed — and nothing here is built on a field nobody has read.
An image file is a rights claim. It never travels without its field.