SAAM Stories

Steven Spielberg tries his hand at being a shadow artist in front of Norman Rockwell's Shadow Artist.

Laurel Fehrenbach, public programs assistant here at American Art, spoke with Sergeant Kevin Burns from Airmen of Note. The jazz group will be performing Saturday, July 3 and Sunday, July 4, from 1 to 3 p.m. as part of our celebration for the opening of our exhibition, Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg shows us how Rockwell went to great lengths to stage his pictures, laboring over costumes for each figure and the individual props that added to the story he wanted the viewer to understand at a glance.

This post is part of an ongoing series on Eye Level: The Best of Ask Joan of Art. Question: A friend told me about an exhibition she had seen a few years ago of small paintings of eyes. I can't find any information on these "eye" paintings. Have you heard of this genre? Where could I find out more about these works?

Hugh Shockey, one of American Art's conservators, recently returned from Haiti where he was helping to preserve some of the country's artworks after the recent earthquake there. Here is one of the reports he filed while he was there.

Of all the stories of internees in the relocation camps for Japanese Americans during World War II, Isamu Noguchi's was the most unusual.

When I typed "birds" into American Art's search engine, I was able to view multiple artists' different takes on the natural world. I came across Seacoast and Flying Birds, a colorful woodblock print by Frances H. Gearhart (1869-1958), and decided to explore the work of an artist I knew nothing about.

American Art's Mandy Young is receiving reports from our conservator, Hugh Shockey, who is in Haiti to help with the rehab of the country's artworks after the recent earthquake there.

I always wondered what it would be like to compose a score for particular artworks in the collection of American Art. Clearly a late- nineteenth-century painting by Thomas Wilmer Dewing would sound different from a meditative Mark Rothko work painted seventy years later.

American artist Louise Bourgeois died on Monday, May 31, at the age of ninety-eight. Born in France to parents who made their living repairing tapestries, she moved to New York City in 1938 and lived and worked there for the rest of her life.

For me, the name Louis Comfort Tiffany conjures up images of art glass, opulence, and the mystique of the Gilded Age. But I had no idea that he was also a photographer and gained some amount of renown for his images. I love this one, an albumen print entitled Fishermen Unloading a Boat, Sea Bright, New Jersey, taken in 1887.

This post is part of an ongoing series on Eye Level: The Best of Ask Joan of Art. Question: At the museum's Renwick Gallery, I saw a grandfather clock covered in a white cloth, but I can't remember the artist or title of this work.

Wes Yamaka recently wrote a comment about his father-in-law on our The Art of Gaman exhibition comment page. We'd like to post it on Eye Level as a testament to the personal stories that have been passed down from internees in the camps.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has the largest collection of works by African American Henry O. Tanner in the United States. Several paintings are in the Lunder Conservation Center undergoing technical analysis in preparation for the 2012 exhibition Henry O. Tanner: An International Retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

This year's Collectors' Roundtable Series concluded the other evening with a spirited presentation by Richard Kelly, who showed us the ins and outs (as well as the oohs and ahhhs) of building a collection of illustrations.

Our closer look at the exhibition, The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese Internment Camps, 1942-1946, continues with The Vest with a Thousand Knots.

This Howard Finster painting was the most talked about artwork at American Art's recent Slow Art event.

"That is not me," Jules Feiffer said, referring to the Bob Landry black-and-white photograph of an elegantly dressed Fred Astaire performing "Puttin' on the Ritz" from the 1946 movie Blue Skies. Feiffer spoke recently on Landry's photograph in the museum's McEvoy auditorium as part of the American Pictures lecture series, which pairs works of art with leading figures of contemporary American culture.