SAAM Stories

The Renwick Gallery is celebrating a milestone year in 2012, its 40th! To give our audience a chance to participate in the fun, we're holding a postcard design contest. We want to see how visitors (both onsite and online) translate the best in American craft, decorative arts, exhibitions, and programs on a mail-worthy 5 by 7 inch space. And most of all, we are excited to see the creative way in which you see the Renwick Gallery.

Helen Frankenthalter, the last of the Abstract Expressionists, died on December 27, 2011, at the age of eighty-three. In 1951, when she was only twenty-three, she began to soak, or stain, her canvasses with extremely thin paint.

The current exhibition, The Great American Hall of Wonders celebrates the 19th-century American spirit of ingenuity through the examination of art, science, and invention. It was a great time to be a scientist, unless, of course, you were a woman (with the field of astronomy being the exception, thanks in part to astronomer Maria Mitchell and the comet she discovered in 1847), a newly arrived immigrant, or a person of color recently granted freedom.

Multiplicity features contemporary prints from the museum's permanent collection. All of the prints are editions and each impression is considered a work of art. Also of interest is the fact that the works on view represent a collaboration between artist and printer.

Exhibition coordinator Georgina Goodlander and curator Chris Melissinos conducted interviews with video game designers, developers, writers, and composers for the upcoming exhibition, The Art of Video Games.

While walking around Toledo, Spain last summer I came upon the Santa Cruz Museum. Much like our museum's nineteenth-century building, which originally housed government offices and was used as a hospital during the Civil War, the Santa Cruz Museum also is housed in a historic building that was once a hospital (their building dates to the sixteenth century).

The American Art Museum is no stranger to invention. The building that houses the museum was formerly the United States Patent Office (President Andrew Jackson authorized the construction of the building in 1836), with thousands of patent models on display on the third floor, including one designed by President Lincoln.

Curator for Latino Art, E. Carmen Ramos, shares some of her thoughts about a recent acquisition now on view in the Lincoln Gallery on the third floor.

Sarah Gowen, American Art's Paintings Conservation Intern, gives us a behind the scenes look at how we solved a painting mystery.

Ah, a walk through the museum on a chilly autumn afternoon. Lots of folks walking the corridors and looking at art. It's a good day. In American Art's Lincoln Gallery on the third floor of the museum, I spent some time getting acquainted with Homage to Still Life by Carlos Almaraz.

Multiplicity opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on November 11 and runs to March 11, 2012. Georgina Goodlander asked the curator, Joann Moser, a few questions about the exhibition.

This porcelain platter was made for President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 by Haviland & Company, in Limoges, France.

Judging by the conversation between Internet gurus Steve Crocker and Vinton Cerf, the world as we know it began about fifty years ago. That's when men like Crocker and Cerf began to figure out ways to break communication out of the box and into a brave, new world of global contact. In some ways, this IS your father's internet, or at least the story of how it all began. Cue the dial-up modem....

Sandra Y. Johnson and her jazz group will be performing at Take 5! on Thursday, November 17th from 5–7 p.m. in the Kogod Courtyard. Laurel Fehrenbach, Public Programs Coordinator for the museum, asked Sandra a few questions about her music and what to expect for her concert.

New York-based artist, Julie Mehretu, was the third and final speaker in this year's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art. Her work uses layers of architectural images--stadiums, airports, ruins both contemporary and ancient--and repurposes them with an eye toward reconceiving and reconceptualizing.

Seventy years ago this week, on October 31, 1941, Mt. Rushmore was completed. More than 90 years ago work began on this iconic image of four presidents carved in granite rock on a mountainside in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Assisting the sculptor Gutzon Borglum (1867-1941) were 361 local miners who used dynamite, jackhammers, and drills to remove the excess rock.

Exhibition coordinator Georgina Goodlander and curator Chris Melissinos conducted interviews with video game designers, developers, writers, and composers for the upcoming exhibition, The Art of Video Games, which opens March 16, 2012 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

October is National Archives Month and as such it gives us a chance to celebrate some of the unique archival holdings that the Smithsonian owns. Blogs across the Smithsonian are giving an inside look at the Institution's archival collections. Kathleen A. Brown, an archivist tasked with sorting through and organizing 40 plus boxes of papers and ephemera from American Art's recently acquired archive of Nam June Paik fills us in on her process.