SAAM Stories

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.

Emily Moazami, one of American Art's photograph archivists, recently found this gem in our Peter A. Juley & Son Collection.

In advance of Alexis Rockman's lecture at American Art on Wednesday night at 7pm, we spoke to him from his Tribeca studio about the talk, monster films, inspiration, and his current exhibition at the museum, Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow.

The Luce Center staff can be a fairly competitive bunch: which of our scavenger hunts gets the most participants or which audio tour stops do visitors listen to most often. But lately, we’ve extended our competition to our ongoing Fill the Gap project where we ask you to help us fill the empty space in one of our cases when an artwork goes on exhibition, loan, or to our conservation center.

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

Pheon is a new alternate reality game at the American Art Museum. Players accept and complete missions through Facebook in order to "prove their worth" to the game's characters.

As we prepare to say farewell to the exhibition, Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, we take a look at some of the people who helped Rockwell tell his story—the people who posed for him.

This post is part of an ongoing series on Eye Level: The Best of Ask Joan of Art. Question: I am interested in the history of woodturning and the use of lathes in early American colonies.

Pierre Huyghe is the 2010 winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Contemporary Artist Award. He is the ninth recipient of the award given to an artist under the age of fifty (he’s forty-eight, so just in time) that is meant to encourage the artist’s future development and experimentation.

With the exhibition Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg closing on January 2nd, we wanted to share some of the comments visitors have shared with us, both online as well as in notebooks in the gallery at American Art.

To coincide with A Revolution in Wood: The Bresler Collection, the current exhibition at the Renwick Gallery, members from local woodturning associations (the Capital Area Woodturners, Chesapeake Woodturners, and Montgomery County Woodturners) demonstrate the process used by the artists in the exhibition to make their one-of-a-kind pieces.