SAAM Stories

Tomorrow, a really wonderful thing happens, and though we’ve thought about it for days and months and years, now that the moment is here it’s hard to know quite what to say.

Tomorrow Eye Level moves its operations from our offices to the museum. We’ll be blogging live throughout the day, documenting the opening for posterity and, of course, for those of you who can’t be here in person. We’ll also be hosting the folks from DCist, who are joining us for the day.

There are just a few staffers who were here in January 2000 when SAAM closed for renovation. I was one of them. July 2006 seemed far away back then —very abstract.

Visitors to our Luce Foundation Center for American Artwill see visible storage cases holding some 3300 works, including this case of Southwestern art featuring Kenneth M. Adams' Juan Duran

Smithsonian Institution Secretary Larry Small, Smithsonian American Art Museum director Elizabeth Broun, and National Portrait Gallery director Marc Pachter assembled Wednesday for the dedication of the building that houses the two museums: the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture.

We open in just nine days and everything is falling into place. Look behind the scenes at final artwork installations and finishing touches.

Yesterday, when Smithsonian Secretary Larry Small pronounced Patty Collette’s winning entry a “spectacular creation,” he wasn’t referring to a contest in a medium commonly associated with the visual arts. This was a battle among cakes. Three prominent pastry chefs were invited to the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture to create cakes inspired by the design of the historic building, in celebration of our grand opening July 1st.

Born in El Paso and an alumnus of the University of Texas at Austin, Jiménez made sculpture that coupled a Pop medium (fiberglass) with traditional Southwestern themes. His work drew from the cultural poles of Mexico City and New York City, both places where he worked and studied, and he was greatly influenced by public artists such as Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. The artist sought to bring Native American, Mexican, and Chicano figures to the fore in works that pay heed to classical sculptural values.

Down the hall from my office is a room full of highly detailed scale models of every SAAM gallery in the museum. The models began taking shape two summers ago.

On Thursday, SAAM preparators reinstalled Luis Jiménez’s Vaquero at the north entrance of the building.

Luis was a close friend to many people here at SAAM and his Vaquero, long installed at our north entrance, is a symbol of the museum.

Somebody was working on Nam June Paik's Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii yesterday. Those are sections of the lower Mississippi river attached to the gray plywood crate on the floor.

In your hurry to cut out of work early before Memorial Day, fill up the cooler, and head toward sunnier climes, you might have missed the news about the rather extraordinary sale of Maxfield Parrish’s Daybreak at Christie’s Important American Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture auction.

The last time I looked around the first floor this room was empty and dark. Now the lights are up and these little tykes have rolled in.

What can paint on canvas do better than a photograph?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a special project here at SAAM in which Advanced Placement Art History students from the Holton-Arms and Landon Schools here in Washington, D.C. visited our Renwick Gallery of American Craft. Their assignment was to research one of our artworks and produce a podcast about the piece they chose.

One fine, crisp morning last week, as you were comfy at home reading Time Magazine’s feature on architect Sir Norman Foster, I was outside the museum in my hard hat and steel-toed boots shivering through a stakeout of our own Foster project.

“Pushing out my old large-format camera’s focal length to twice-infinity,” Hiroshi Sugimoto writes, ". . . I discovered that superlative architecture survives the onslaught of blurred photography.”