SAAM Stories

Recently my roommate and I found ourselves tossed out of the Dada exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. No, not for any Dada-inspired improvised performances—merely because the museum closed. We showed up at the museum at 2:30 p.m. or so on a Saturday and hadn't finished looking through the final room when the museum announced last call.

Tyler Green writes about an off-key Wayne Thiebaud given to the Smithsonian American Art Museum last year as part of a bequest by Arthur and Edith Levin. It's a 1957 painting of an electric chair, which places Thiebaud on the capital punishment beat several years before Andy Warhol stepped his Sing Sing photograph into production in the early 1960s for his iconic electric chair series.

The Museums and the Web conference announced the winners of its Best of the Web competition Friday in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

This doesn't specifically concern American art—or even anything on the planet Earth—but of the craters on the planet Mercury named after important terrestrial cultural figures, only one American artist and one American architect are represented: respectively, John Singleton Copley (latitude: 38.4S, longitude: 85.2W) and Louis Sullivan (latitude: 16.9S, longitude: 86.3W).

I thought I was beginning to understand this job just a little bit. We talk to curators and educators about art, listen to the public, and generally get excited about things and try to pull it all together in digital form. We’ve been doing Web and new media for 10 years now, and I was beginning to feel like I was getting the hang of it.

A grammar maven and self-described “vituperative right-wing scandalmonger,” former New York Times opinion columnist William Safire is not your typical arts advocate. But Safire wants you to rethink not only the politics of art but art itself, according to Philip Kennicott’s Washington Post write-up of the 19th annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy.

How does SAAM move a monumental artwork into the museum? Watch this video to find out!

Grant Wood’s iconic work, American Gothic, makes a return visit to Washington for the first time in 40 years. See it—along with lesser-known gems, such as Corn Cob Chandelier— in Grant Wood’s Studio: Birthplace of American Gothic.

A small crowd gathered in our offices this morning to watch Scott Rosenfeld, SAAM's lighting designer, play with this funky new light fixture. Instead of a halogen or incandescent bulb, it has an array of colored LED's and a control panel with sliders that manipulate the color balance of the light. It's surprisingly bright, and it reminded many of us of a cross between a (very, very intense) disco light and a Lite-Brite, if you remember those.

These days biennials are met as often with fanfare as with handwringing about the state of the curated art survey. Mark Stevens discusses this year’s curator–critic matchup in his New York Magazine pregame analysis of the 2006 Whitney Biennial, “Day for Night,” which opens March 2.

In light of the recent passing of both Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, Americans may take solace that some progress has been made toward realizing an institution that will pay tribute to them both: the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).

This timelapse video shows SAAM staffers Caroline Little and Dale Hunt installing one of the first cases in our new Luce Foundation Center for American Art.

As I'm sure many readers know by now, the tremendous video and Fluxus artist Nam June Paik died last month at the age of 74. Of his many works that have been discussed both in the press and the blogosphere over the last two weeks, one especially comes to mind now that the winter Olympics have begun: the more the better. An installation comprising 1,003 screens, the work was staged in honor of the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.

Over the last few months no fewer than three local exhibitions have featured works by Margaret Boozer, giving viewers ample opportunity to think and rethink about her work.

Roberta Smith, art critic for the New York Times, spoke on October 5, 2005 as part of the Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art series, sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Late Friday we got word that Eye Level is a finalist for a South by Southwest Interactive Web Award in the Blog category. SXSW defines this category as "Sites that revolutionize the power of publishing by providing regularly updated content of a personal or professional nature."

And the 14 nominees for the 2006 Smithsonian American Art Museum Lucelia Artist Award are:

I think it's a safe bet that there will be 50 to 60 new and bona fide (i.e., seriously authored by qualified people) art world blogs by the end of the year. Why is this significant? In some cases, the blogs may speed up the infotainment machine that's impacting the actual, hands-on, real-world art scene, locally and internationally.