SAAM Stories

Emily Moazami, one of American Art's photograph archivists, recently found this gem in our Peter A. Juley & Son Collection.

In advance of Alexis Rockman's lecture at American Art on Wednesday night at 7pm, we spoke to him from his Tribeca studio about the talk, monster films, inspiration, and his current exhibition at the museum, Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow.

The Luce Center staff can be a fairly competitive bunch: which of our scavenger hunts gets the most participants or which audio tour stops do visitors listen to most often. But lately, we’ve extended our competition to our ongoing Fill the Gap project where we ask you to help us fill the empty space in one of our cases when an artwork goes on exhibition, loan, or to our conservation center.

This is the seventh in a series of personal observations about how people experience and explore museums. Take a look at Howard's other blog posts on the subject.

Pheon is a new alternate reality game at the American Art Museum. Players accept and complete missions through Facebook in order to "prove their worth" to the game's characters.

As we prepare to say farewell to the exhibition, Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, we take a look at some of the people who helped Rockwell tell his story—the people who posed for him.

This post is part of an ongoing series on Eye Level: The Best of Ask Joan of Art. Question: I am interested in the history of woodturning and the use of lathes in early American colonies.

Pierre Huyghe is the 2010 winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Contemporary Artist Award. He is the ninth recipient of the award given to an artist under the age of fifty (he’s forty-eight, so just in time) that is meant to encourage the artist’s future development and experimentation.

With the exhibition Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg closing on January 2nd, we wanted to share some of the comments visitors have shared with us, both online as well as in notebooks in the gallery at American Art.

To coincide with A Revolution in Wood: The Bresler Collection, the current exhibition at the Renwick Gallery, members from local woodturning associations (the Capital Area Woodturners, Chesapeake Woodturners, and Montgomery County Woodturners) demonstrate the process used by the artists in the exhibition to make their one-of-a-kind pieces.

American Art's latest exhibition is Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow. Eye Level sat down with the show's curator, Joanna Marsh, to talk about the artist and his artworks.

This post is part of an ongoing series on Eye Level: The Best of Ask Joan of Art. Begun in 1993, Ask Joan of Art is the longest-running arts-based electronic reference service in the country. Question: Duane Hanson's sculpture Woman Eating is dated 1971, but the magazine on the table where she sits is only a few years old. Why is this?

Who doesn’t love sipping coffee and looking at art while enjoying the sounds of local musicians? Sunday, November 7 marked the beginning of a new Luce Foundation Center Art+Coffee performance series, aka Luce Unplugged, which we hope will encourage visitors to do just that!

Installation artist Sarah Sze gave an enthusiastic talk the other evening at the McEvoy Auditorium at American Art, as the third and final speaker of this year's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture Series in American Art.

Alexis Rockman was one of the first contemporary artists to build his career around exploring environmental issues, from evolutionary biology and genetic engineering to deforestation and climate change. His new exhibition bring together 47 paintings and works on paper from his early works in the mid-1980s to the present.

It's Wayne Thiebaud's 90th birthday.

This post is part of an ongoing series on Eye Level: The Best of Ask Joan of Art. Question: I was visiting the Renwick Gallery's Grand Salon and wanted to know why the works were displayed so differently from the other gallery exhibits?

Boston Globe photography and arts critic, Mark Feeney, presented his lecture "Four Photographers on Three Wheels: William Eggleston's Tricycle and Before" at American Art's McEvoy Auditorium the other night, as the second speaker of this year's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art.