SAAM Stories

The Luce Foundation Center is not a static space. Every so often SAAM's curators come and "shop" for artworks to be included in new exhibitions.

I’m not sure why I like art that incorporates found objects so much. Maybe it’s the idea of someone’s trash being someone else’s treasure. Maybe it’s the unique experience that is created through a combination of ordinary items. Mostly, though, it’s the stories that these objects can tell, both individually and as parts of a larger whole.

One of the most important things I've learned as a photographer is to slow down when looking at images.

Stan Brakhage's film, 23rd Psalm, Branch (Part I) from his Song series is forty-four minutes of war footage interspersed with images of the filmmaker's home town in Colorado. Brakhage made it in 1966 as a personal response to the Vietnam war.

Inspired by Howard Cook's 1930 woodcut Summer Vegetables, I wandered through the farmer's market at Dupont Circle (fairly close to my home in downtown Washington, D.C.) in search of the same items that appear in Cook's work. And I'd say I came back with a pretty successful haul: corn, tomatoes, summer squash, and snap peas.

And tonight the Oscar goes to . . . David Beck, best known at SAAM for two of his works, MVSEVM and Movie Palace; the latter is on view in the Luce Foundation Center for American Art on the third floor at SAAM.

Bill Viola's The Passing is fifty-four minutes of visual comment on the themes of birth, life, and death.

We'd like to welcome three new contributors to Eye Level: Georgina Bath, Edward Bray, and Bridget Callahan. All work at the Luce Foundation Center, our open study/storage facility displaying over thirty-three hundred objects from the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. They will be writing periodically about artworks that can be found at Luce. Georgina begins by looking at a special piece of glass.

With the recent death of seminal artist Robert Rauschenberg, the airwaves and the blogwaves have been filled with stories of the artist, from his childhood in North Dakota to his early days at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, to the heady years in New York City. Rauschenberg also left his footprints in another city that played a significant role in his life: that's right, our very own Washington, D.C.

Summer at SAAM is bound to heat up this week as we kick off Carnaval del Corazón, or Carnival of the Heart. This Thursday evening, July 3 from 5 to 8 p.m., join us in the skylit Kogod Courtyard for salsa demonstrations and dancing, accompanied by irresistible music from Puerto Rico and Cuba.

Greetings from Paris. I'm here for a week for the exhibition of a friend's paintings and have fallen in love all over again with this city. It's a city for the senses: everything seems a bit more alive here, a bit more full. Artists and writers (and lovers) have always been drawn to Paris. It's also an excellent place for bloggers!

Anna Deavere Smith gave the final talk in the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series. Smith spoke about a Ruth Orkin photo, Member of the Wedding, Opening Night, Ethel Waters, Carson McCullers, and Julie Harris, New York City, 1950. I never knew that a seemingly quiet photo could say so much.

Gallop! A Scanimation Picture Book is one of those books I bought for a child in my life, but was reluctant to hand it over when the fateful day came. The book mesmerized me from the start. The minute I picked it up in the museum shop, I was hooked.

On the evening of March 6, 1865, a ten dollar ticket admitted "one gentleman and two ladies" to President Lincoln's second inaugural ball, held in the very building that is now American Art: the Patent Office Building. Estimates of attendance ranged from 4,000 to 6,000 people.

The ballparks in my old stomping ground of New York are shutting their doors. The newspapers reported the impending closing of Yankee and Shea Stadiums, in the Bronx and Queens, respectively. My dad, who lived in Queens after I left for college, would meet me at Shea Stadium and we'd watch a Mets game together.

My favorite scene in the documentary on Jackson Pollock that recently arrived from Netflix was the one in which the director had the artist paint on a sheet of glass while he filmed from below. I always loved the wild whiplash of Pollock's brushstrokes but seeing it done before my eyes was kind of amazing. He splattered and dripped and it all looked incredibly deliberate. Everything fell into place. Once in a while I've stood before a Pollock, say at MOMA, and heard somebody next to me whisper, "Oh, I can do that," or worse, "My kids can do that." I'm afraid that they can't.

If you're into museums and nighttime (two of my favorite things) you should check out our kids' interactive, Meet Me At Midnight. It's a clever look at our museum after hours and what happens when the lights go out and the objects are pretty much on their own (with the guards, of course!)

We asked SAAM's Patrick Martin, to write a post about a new Web initiative from our museum’s Education department: Superhighway Scholars.