SAAM Stories

Nam June Paik: Global Visionary closes this Sunday. The exhibition has been on view for a little over eight months, a long time for both the museum and the artworks. I will be sad to see it go. I'll sincerely miss having this work on view, and it is nice to see the artist himself as I pass through the gallery every day. But mostly, I’m excited. While this installation is indeed closing, Nam June Paik has really set the stage for the museum's Film and Media Art Initiative, in more ways than one.

Landscapes In Passing: Photographs by Steve Fitch, Robbert Flick, and Elaine Mayes opened last week on the museum's second floor. This installation looks at representations of the American landscape by three different artists. While each artist had a different approach, all of the works explore the impact of expanding civilization on the natural world.

You can now see Constantino Brumidi's Study for the Apotheosis of Washington in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol Building on the second floor of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, near the sculpture of George Washington Resigning his Commission by Ferdinand Pettrich. This was the final study that Brumidi completed before beginning work on the interior of the Capitol dome, and the painting reveals a great deal about the artist's process.

Laurel Fehrenbach is a Public Programs Coordinator at the American Art Museum, and runs the "Is This Art?" gallery talks with her colleague, Carol Wilson, Assistant Chair of Education for In-Gallery Programs. The next "Is This Art?" program is this Saturday, July 27th at noon. Meet in the Lincoln Gallery, 3rd floor.

What's the story behind the girl of this sculpture? Who was she? We aren't sure exactly because very little is known about the artist, Ed Davis, who inscribed his name along with the year, 1935, on the front of the sculpture's wooden base. All we know is that Mr. Davis was active in New York in the 1930s. Like much of the American Art Museum's folk art pieces, this one came into the collection through a gift by folk art collector Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr. in 1986. Girl with Tambourine was done in a style similar to the artist Elie Nadelman who was known for using curved lines and simplified volumes. Nadelman found inspiration for his work in movies, jazz, and vaudeville as well as in his own collection of American folk art which was on view in Riverdale, New York for eleven years starting in 1926.

The artwork and ideas of Nam June Paik were a major influence on late twentieth-century art and continue to inspire a new generation of artists. Each year, the museum celebrates Paik's birthday on July 20 with a talk by a contemporary artist who was influenced by his work.

Jazz drummer Harold Summey will present the music of the Weather Report at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Take 5! concert on July 18, 2013 from 5-8 p.m. in the Kogod Courtyard.

The Smithsonian AIDS Memorial Quilt Panel will be displayed in the Kogod Courtyard at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery on July 17th, between 11:30 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. This is a special one-day-only opportunity for members of the public to view a meaningful Smithsonian community art project. Alli Jessing, Programs coordinator and auditorium manager at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, talks about her experiences working on the quilt.

With the recent acquisition of Cloud Music, a collaboration between Robert Watts, David Behrman, and Bob Diamond, one window-lit corner of the Lincoln Gallery has been turned into a sky-driven audio/video installation.

n this blog post Curatorial Assistant Florencia Bazzano-Nelson explores the rich links between Latino art and the Cuban poster movement, which captivated artists in the United States and abroad in the 1960s and 1970s. The works discussed below will be featured in the upcoming exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, opening October 25, 2013, along with other works that attest to the importance of graphics and international artistic models for Latino artists.

The next Handi-hour is on Wednesday, July 10 and will feature garden crafts!

At the museum's McEvoy Auditorium the other evening, guest curator Merry Foresta set out to talk about how she put together the new exhibition, A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

We are always sad to see a piece leave the Luce Foundation Center, especially when it's a visitor favorite. Sometimes though, an artwork's departure (for loan or display elsewhere in the museum) gives us an opportunity put up another piece from our collection. This was the case with Palmer Hayden's The Janitor Who Paints.

The exhibition A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum opens today, celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the establishment of the museum's pioneering photography collection. The exhibition title refers to Walt Whitman's belief that photography was a quintessentially American activity, rooted in everyday people and ordinary things and presented in a straightforward way. The exhibition features 113 photographs selected from the museum’s permanent collection and includes works by Timothy O'Sullivan, Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Trevor Paglen, William Eggleston and Ana Mendieta.

This is the eleventh in a series of personal observations about how people experience and explore museums. Take a look at Howard's other blog posts about seeing things.

This post is part of an ongoing series on Eye Level: Q and Art, where American Art's Research department brings you interesting questions and answers about art and artists from our archive.

Morgan Nau, an objects conservator and plaster specialist on fellowship with American Art's Lunder Center clues us into how conservators keep our artworks clean.

Last Friday night, American Art's Luce Foundation Center hosted local bands, brews and great art all in one place— and with no cover charge. Amid the 3,000 artworks located in the Luce Center, we presented the latest installment of our Luce Unplugged Community Showcase.