SAAM Stories

Mike wrote about one of the Kogod Courtyard's interesting features, a series of water scrims throughout the enclosure.

Workers putting the finishing touches on our awesome new Lord Norman Foster/Foster + Partners-designed Kogod Courtyard.

There was a huge crane outside the museum and a large truck that contained Holzer's For SAAM, her 2007 conceptual site-specific sculpture. The twenty-eight-foot piece was protected by a long crate.

If you've been in our neighborhood in the last six years or so, you've noticed the big, gray, plywood construction fences that surrounded the museum.

Jeremiah Gallay, one of SAAM’s exhibition designers, recently installed the show Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape in one of our galleries. He writes on how he chose to design the space.

Six of the seven winners of the Lucelia Artist Award have work on view in a special exhibition, Celebrating the Lucelia Artist Award, 2001–2006, on display now. Eye Level caught up with 2005 winner Andrea Zittel while she was at the museum installing A–Z Homestead Office for Lisa Ivorian Gray.

It's the dawn of the new fiscal year (ok, so you're not interested in the ways of the federal government). But in this case it means I get to introduce you to a new addition to our Eye Level team, Howard Kaplan. Howard will be joining Kriston and the rest of us blogging all things American art.

We have launched two new podcasts this week: an audio podcast, The Prints of Sean Scully, (whose exhibition is on display at the museum until October 8) and our first video podcast on our Lunder Conservation Center.

Timing is everything. On my way to photograph the installation of Andrea Zittel's work for our upcoming exhibition Celebrating the Lucelia Artist Award, 2001—2006, I stopped off to see what was happening in our courtyard.

I grew up in D.C. and have always been fascinated by the architecture here. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes a muddle, and always written about by Benjamin Forgey in the Washington Post.

Jessica Stockholder is the 2007 Lucelia Artist Award winner. Stockholder works in expansive installations at a time in which the boundaries of sculpture and installation have been so greatly enlarged that even an installation the size of a room might seem modest by comparison to other artists working in the genre.

Last summer we blogged about how Morris Kantor played with perspective to fit a ballpark drama into his painting Baseball at Night, so I was fascinated to see Marjorie Phillips' painting Night Baseball on a recent trip to the Phillips Collection.

Photographic portraits of veterans are a proven entity in museums and, to my mind, photography memorializes soldiers and wars. But will these photographs always serve that function—and do they even now?

American art makes a few surprise appearances in popular music this week.

When we talk about creating Web sites or interpretive materials for the museum I always think about promoting the idea that artists aren't a clan of exotic space aliens but are regular people who look at the world, think about it, and channel their reactions and decisions into making works of art.

I didn't purchase the professional version of Smithsonian Radar when I signed on for this job ten years ago (that's reserved for our Public Affairs department who scours newspapers and magazines for all coverage of our museum). However, I frequently find myself using the open source version when I come upon our name in the media.

If his brush stroke doesn't tip you off, his subject matter will. And if by the subject matter you can't tell that George Catlin's paintings were done in the field, then seeing his buffalo bladder paint skins will put all doubt from mind.

This year marks the seventh Lucelia Artist Award, an annual award in which the Smithsonian American Art Museum recognizes an artist under age 50 for his or her contribution to contemporary art.