We are entering an exciting era where it is possible to directly observe the assembly of giant planets, both through detection and characterization of forming protoplanets and through high-resolution, high-contrast imaging of the circumstellar and circumplanetary environments in which they form. I will describe our recent progress in detecting and vetting protoplanet candidates, which requires robust techniques for separating planetary emission from that of the surrounding morphologically-complex circumstellar disk. I will also describe our recent multiwavelength ground and space-based efforts to characterize protoplanets and young, accreting brown dwarfs. These efforts have the goal of informing the properties of protoplanets on a population-level and speak strongly to the promise of JWST for informing accretion physics and disentangling planet formation pathways .