SAAM Stories

I've had dreams about WPA murals measuring forty inches wide. Visions of playful, contemporary teapots that stand eight inches tall have danced in my head. This is what the gaps in the Luce Foundation Center's cases have done to me! But these gaps also present the exciting opportunity to put a fresh artwork from storage out on view at the museum. Here's how it works.

Eye Level had a chance to speak with Eleanor Harvey, senior curator at American Art, and curator of the new exhibition, The Civil War and American Art, opening at the museum on November 16. The exhibition takes a close look at the war through the eyes of artists who captured the soldiers in the field, the people back home, as well as the war’s aftermath: abolition, emancipation, and reconstruction.

In this post, program coordinator Christopher Wayner talks about a recent discovery made by conservators in the museum's Lunder Conservation Center.

Question: Is American Art’s Liberty sculpture one of the models made to raise money for the construction of the Statue of Liberty? If not, what is it?

Today, the American Art Museum announced that Kathy Butterly is the 2012 winner of our Contemporary Artist Award. She was selected after a lively discussion by a panel of five independent experts who know the contemporary art world inside and out. This biennial award recognizes an artist younger than fifty who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity.

This blog post inaugurates a monthly Eye Level feature on our upcoming exhibition The Civil War and American Art. Curator Eleanor Harvey will be talking about many of the important intersections between American art and the Civil War. The exhibition will open November 16 and run through April 28, 2013.

This blog post begins a series of pieces about our film and media arts initiatives here at American Art. First up, Michael Mansfield, associate curator of film and media art, fills us in on our upcoming exhibition Nam June Paik: Global Visionary, which opens December 13 and runs through August 11, 2013.

"Like most of you in this audience , I suspect, I am a museum goer, a gallery goer. I get no thrill as large as I do from simply setting foot in a museum and beginning to look,"

You may not think about the potential dust that could collect in-between the teeth of Tiger by Felipe Archuleta on display in American Art's first floor folk art galleries, but it is the job of Susan Edwards, conservation technician, to make sure he has a clean smile.

The Luce Foundation Center has been organizing scavenger hunts throughout the space since we reopened after our renovation in 2006. Over twenty thousand people have searched our open storage for those elusive objects. It's one of the special ways visitors can experience our collection.

In this blog post Curatorial Assistant Florencia Bazzano-Nelson comments on John Valadez's Two Vendors, an intense and large-scale pastel that will be featured in the upcoming 2013 exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art. Like other works in the exhibition, this work demonstrates the masterful ways in which Latino artists—many born and/or raised in large cities in California, New York and beyond—have drawn inspiration from America's urban streets.

"I'll be talking about the entire history of studio glass, all 3500 years of it, in about twelve minutes. That's 300 years per minute but I'm going to skip some centuries entirely," William Warmus, independent curator and studio glass expert said at the beginning of the recent program at the Renwick Gallery titled "Art Glass @50," that also featured the artists Toots Zynsky and Matthew Szösz.

We sat down with Debrah Dunner, curatorial assistant at the museum's Renwick Gallery, to ask her about the experience of helping curator Nicholas Bell put together 40 under 40: Craft Futures. Dunner worked for two years alongside Bell ensuring the exhibition content and catalogue came together.

"Is there anything left to be said about Edward Hopper? Poet of light, documentarian of alienation, isolation, angst, stasis, human disconnection and impotence?" art historian Kevin Salatino asked at the start of his talk, Edward Hopper and the Burden of (Un)Certainty the first of this year's annual Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art.

After more than six months on view, The Art of Video Games exhibition will be closing at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on September 30, 2012.

We are delighted to introduce a new member of our social media team here at the Smithsonian American Art Museum - PaikBot! PaikBot is the nickname we've given to one of the robot artworks in the upcoming exhibition, Nam June Paik: Global Visionary.

Have you ever thought about the way the paper fibers hold on to ink as you are writing down your grocery or to do list on a sheet of paper? Neither had I, until I listened to Kate Maynor, paper conservator here at American Art, speak about the examination and treatment of works on paper in the Abstract Drawings show.

In the words of How I Met your Mother's Barney Stinson, our next Luce Unplugged is going to be, "legen . . . wait for it . . . dary." Legendary. Pop culture references aside, this Friday's Luce Unplugged Community Showcase features great local musicians, Alex Minoff, The Caribbean, and Kokayi, as well as a free beer tasting by local brewery DC Brau (get here early, the tasting is from 6 to 7 p.m.). We have also partnered with the Washington City Paper, which has been an invaluable music resource for us as well as the community at large.