SAAM Stories

Chris Melissinos is the curator for the 2012 exhibition The Art of Video Games at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Georgina Goodlander, project manager for the exhibition and interpretive programs manager for the museum’s Luce Foundation Center, asked him where the concept for the exhibition began and what surprised him about the public voting, currently underway.

When you view an art exhibition, you're seeing the result of a process that is months, sometimes years, in the making. Artists and curators converse; curators visualize and organize the show; and finally each work is placed in a gallery.

George Ault didn't very much like the world-at-large, so he left New York City in 1937, and moved about 100 miles north to the village of Woodstock, New York with Louise Jonas, whom he would marry four years later.

Pioneering ceramic artist, Toshiko Takaezu, passed away last week in her native Hawaii at the age of 88, following a six-decade career in clay.

It seems like DC's art scene is exploding. New art spaces are popping up across the city and blogs that focus on art-related activities are becoming more numerous. Is DC the next big art city? Who can say? I know one thing for sure—a lot of talented people call the DC metropolitan area home.

Have you noticed any of the spiders in Alexis Rockman’s paintings on view at American Art? The creepy-crawly, sometimes long-legged, sometimes furry, sometimes poisonous insects often cause people to jump on chairs and scream like children. But before you step on a spider or squish it in a paper towel, consider this: today, March 14, is Save a Spider Day.

Paintings Conservator, Amber Kerr-Allison does a final inspection of George Ault's painting Bright Light at Russell's Corners with a UV flashlight just before the show opens.

John Maccabee, founder of CityMystery, helped to create Ghosts of a Chance, American Art's first alternate reality game which was a first for museums everywhere. He and his team recently helped us launch Pheon, which has an online component as well. We caught up with the San Francisco-based Maccabee when he stopped by the museum last week.

This post is part of an ongoing series on Eye Level: The Best of Ask Joan of Art. Begun in 1993. Question: Charles Alvah Walker and Albion Harris Bicknell are artists associated with monotype prints. I can find information about the artists, but what is a monotype? How would I know if I was looking at one?

In conjunction with the exhibition Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow, the American Art Museum presents the Art and Science lecture series that places the science of climate change within a cultural context. Alexis Rockman kicked off the series.

On March 16, 2012, the Smithsonian American Art Museum will open The Art of Video Games, a major exhibition that will explore the forty-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium. We launched the voting website at noon on Monday, February 14 and were immediately overwhelmed with the huge response.

Jasper Johns, one of our favorite artists renowned for his paintings and printmaking, received the Medal of Freedom Tuesday night from President Obama.

Christopher Kendall, Dean and Paul Boylan Collegiate Professor of Music of the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, leads the musical ensemble, 21st Century Consort, which is in residence at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in a concert Saturday, February 12, 2011.

John Hanhardt, the senior curator of media art at the American Art Museum, has put together the current exhibition, Watch This! New Directions in the Art of the Moving Image in American Art's new media art gallery. It features the work of Nam June Paik, the founding father of video art, as well as Cory Arcangel, Bill Viola, Jim Campbell, Peter Campus, Svetlana and Igor Kopystiansky, Marina Zurkow, and Kota Ezawa, whose work, LYAM 3D, is best viewed with those funky blue and red 3D glasses provided in the gallery.

This post is part of an ongoing series on Eye Level: The Best of Ask Joan of Art. Question: What kind of Cubism was Jacob Lawrence known for employing?

Scott Rosenfeld, American Art's lighting designer, lets us in on the challenges of lighting an artwork.

On Sunday, The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942-1946 ends its nearly year long run at the Renwick Gallery. I'm sure I'm not alone in naming this one of my favorite recent exhibitions, and will be sad to see it go. In honor of the exhibition and its closing, Eye Level spoke with the exhibition's curator, Delphine Hirasuna, who is also a writer and a blogger, from her home in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Alexis Rockman kicked off the first in the series of "Art and Science" talks at American Art's McEvoy Auditorium in conjunction with the exhibition of his work: Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow.