Whatever your plans for America's birthday, we have an artwork to fit. Pour yourself a lemonade, find a spot in the shade, and enjoy your holiday with a dash of American art.
Coloring books can offer space for creativity or release for children and adults. Inspired by artwork in SAAM’s collection, while away a quiet afternoon with some art supplies and our coloring sheets.
Because at SAAM everything eventually comes back to American art, some of us have been inspired to model our sweet, sassy, bored, annoyed, sleepy, amusing pets after favorite artworks in our collection. We offer them as amusement and inspiration, and as evidence of the creativity and sense of humor we appreciate in each other.
Walt Whitman, born in 1819, would be celebrating his two-hundredth birthday today, if such a thing were possible. Let us celebrate the poet with a round of American art from our collection.
One of the best parts of my day is the time I set aside to search through the comments and photos people share with us on social media about the museum's artworks.
For more than a year, Janet Echelman's woven sculpture 1.8 Renwick has beckoned people into the Grand Salon. Suspended high above, the billowing nets transform the space. At once an artwork and an experience, people walk around the room as colors projected on the hand-knotted nets shift, or stretch out on the floor for a new view and a moment of peace.
It all began with a challenge, exactly one year ago. The National Museum of Women in the Arts posed a question and the goal was simple: get people talking about women artists.
On December 1, Dakin Hart, senior curator of The Noguchi Museum and co-curator of Isamu Noguchi, Archaic/Modern gave a talk at SAAM on the themes of the exhibition. As Hart navigates Noguchi's visionary work, he looks at the artist's ability to take inspiration from the ancient and the modern to create abstract and timeless works.
Today, we begin a periodic series of photos visitors take in our galleries where, with many exhibitions, photography is encouraged. In my daily dive into our social media interactions, I take note of the unique ways you, our visitors, capture your experience in SAAM and the Renwick Gallery.
Shortly after its release, colleagues began playing Pokémon Go —an augmented reality game that has captured the imagination of the entire internet. Museum visitors were doing the same. At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, new games are often received with more enthusiasm than might be expected of an art museum. Perhaps you've heard, SAAM has a long history with games. Creating, collecting, exhibiting, and, of course, playing them. They're fun, they're often beautiful, and best of all, they connect people.