SAAM Stories

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.

Today, I stood in front of Helen Searle's Still Life with Fruit and Champagne and thought, this spread looks pretty good for being nearly 140 years old. Searle, born in Burlington, Vermont in 1830, painted this still life when she was thirty-six.

What would you choose if someone were to ask you to pick an iconic work of art that spoke to you like no other? Apparently, when historian Gary Wills was asked to participate in the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series, he knew immediately that he'd speak about Thomas Eakins's painting, William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River.

April may be the cruelest month, if you believe T. S. Eliot. But it's also National Poetry Month, which may bring down the cruelty level by a notch or two. For me, Walt Whitman is the gold standard of American poets. In the Luce Foundation Center for American Art, he takes the bronze.

We just launched a new podcast in our museum series about our photography collection and exhibitions here at SAAM.

"Contemporary art," says Robert Storr, "is simply the most recent of modern art and modern art is an ongoing phenomenon."

"Don't call me a collector," Helen Williams Drutt said recently to an audience at the Renwick Gallery who came to view the exhibition Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection, "I consider myself an educator."

The American Art Museum mourns the loss of choreographer Merce Cunningham who died on July 26, 2009. This post was published last year as a tribute to Cunningham's creativity and ability to incorporate new methods of expression in his work.

The Kogod Courtyard, shared by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, has just been named one of seven architectural wonders of the world by Condé Nast Traveler magazine. Way to go! From the article:

With the Color as Field exhibition in full swing, I went back to take another look, and found myself returning to Sam Francis's painting, Blue Balls from 1960.

Eye Level had a chance to catch up with performance artist (that's short for singer, composer, poet, filmmaker, inventor of unusual instruments, instrumentalist, and photographer) Laurie Anderson ahead of her scheduled talk on March 15 at 4:30 pm in the McEvoy Auditorium at SAAM/NPG (8th and F Streets NW). Anderson will be speaking about Andy Warhol's iconic image Little Electric Chair as part of the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series.

In an election year I thought it might be good to take another look (or two) at photographer Nancy Burson's image The President (second version), in which the likenesses of five of our most recent heads of state merge into one, well....larger head.

Fermented Soil (1965) by Hans Hofmann contains such fresh joy and vigor it is hard to believe it was painted by a man in his mid-eighties. It swings like a jazz sextet. Hofmann was right in the swim of what was going on in painting at that moment, and Color Field painting would have been impossible without his contribution.

In the Washington Post, Style Section Editor John Pancake discusses Elihu Vedder's The Sun God in an interview with SAAM framer Martin Kotler, who faced a challenge in building a frame for the piece.