SAAM Stories

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.

It's a favorite pastime of curmudgeons everywhere: Setting faux-naive paintings alongside naive paintings and asking supposed art experts to pick the real from the fake. Radar magazine gets in on the act here, daring savvy readers to prove through an online quiz that they're not faking it when they say they know what art is.

Workers are now installing radiant heating/cooling tubes and the infrastructure for the water features—yes, I said water features—in the courtyard floor.

The most significant lesson in John Hanhardt's last lecture on new media art concerned historical revisionism. Hanhardt professes that contemporary video artists—the subject of his fourth and final installment—worked with unexpected sources in their work, not merely by drawing inspiration from and references to the Western art-historical canon in the way that artists in other media do.

Ken Johnson raises several good questions in his New York Times piece, where he takes the pulse of current sculpture by discussing what's up in the galleries this month.

Looking over some Washington Post archives, I found this review by Michael O'Sullivan of a show that was up at American University's Katzen Arts Center earlier this spring.

SAAM New Media projects have just won two MUSE awards from the American Association of Museums. The MUSE awards recognize excellence in the use of media and technology in museums.

"Herman Melville's cursed wanderers, Raymond Chandler's tough guys, and Walt Whitman's solitary individualists"—that's how one art critic described H. C. Westermann's person and works, a description that captures his work as well as his biography.

In This Case is a series of periodic posts on art in the Luce Foundation Center, a visible art storage facility at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that displays more than 3,300 pieces in fifty-seven cases.

Saturday, improv comedy group Now This! will be improvising scenes based on Saul Steinberg's New Yorker cartoons. Sunday, New Yorker Cartoon Editor Bob Mankoff talks about Steinberg's early work.

For a moment I felt an intense flashback to my college days: I walked into the auditorium, took my seat, and was handed a five-page handout listing slides and films that would be shown (complete with a bibliography for the lecture). A reporter's notebook seemed suddenly small for the note-taking task.

In This Case is a series of periodic posts on art in the Luce Foundation Center, a visible art storage facility at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that displays more than 3,300 pieces in fifty-seven cases.

The upcoming exhibition of Sean Scully's prints puts me in mind of a conversation I had some time ago with an artist. This artist's paintings were (and still are) greatly in demand, but they're not the only work that he does.

Tuesday, May 15, John Hanhardt, SAAM's new Senior Media Arts Curator, begins his lecture series about the history and directions of media arts in the U.S. We on the Web team are pretty excited about having John as a colleague and though he's quite well known in the field this is a bit of a coming out for him and SAAM's media arts program in DC.