SAAM Stories

Filmmakers Albert Maysles and his brother, David (who died in 1987), are recognized as masters of "direct cinema," the American cousin of French "cinéma vérité." They first met Christo and Jeanne-Claude in the early 1960s and filmed many of their works over the decades, including two that will be screened at American Art's McEvoy Auditorium on April 29, at 6:30 pm: Valley Curtain (1973) and Christo in Paris (1986).

Nina Simon is well known to museum folks as the author of the blog Museum 2.0. She consults with museums around the world to design exhibitions, programs, and online experiences that engage visitors as co-creators and community members, not just consumers.

On April 20, in the Luce Foundation Center's weekly Draw & Discover sketching workshop, we will look at preparatory drawings, models, and photographs in the exhibition Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence, which opened recently at the American Art Museum.

In the second of three Collectors' Roundtable lectures this spring, Elmerina and Dr. Paul Parkman and John T. Kotelly led a spirited conversation on collecting contemporary craft. All three share a passion for studio arts and related stories of how they began collecting, what they've acquired since, and how once the collecting bug strikes, your life may never be the same.

Six months ago American Art, along with twelve other museums around the world, invited people to spend an afternoon taking a long look at art as part of Slow Art day. It was the antithesis of the fast-paced social networking world personified by Twitter and Facebook.

Laurel Fehrenbach, public programs assistant here at American Art, manages the free Take 5! jazz concerts, which take place in the Kogod Courtyard every third Thursday from 5–8 p.m. She talked with Sandy Asirvatham, who will be performing vocals and keyboard with Frank Russo (drums), Max Murray (bass) and Jeff Antoniuk (sax) at Take 5! The program, A Tribute to the Tax Man with Sandy Asirvatham, will take place on tax day, Thursday, April 15, in the museum’s Kogod Courtyard from 5–8 p.m.

This post is part of an ongoing series on Eye Level: The Best of Ask Joan of Art. Begun in 1993, Ask Joan of Art is the longest-running arts-based electronic reference service in the country. Question: Can you tell me more about Eleanor Roosevelt's connection to Augustus Saint-Gaudens's Adams Memorial?

With the opening of the much-anticipated exhibition Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence, Eye Level had a chance to speak with Christo about the making of the original outdoor installation, Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972-76.

Running Fence, the monumental temporary artwork by Christo and Jeanne-Claude existed for only two weeks in September of 1976. It was made of 240,000 square yards of heavy woven white nylon fabric, 90 miles of steel cable, 2,050 steel poles, 350,000 hooks, and 13,000 earth anchors. In 2008 American Art acquired the definitive record of this artwork and our exhibition, Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence opens this Friday.

American Art holds an important collection of works by William H. Johnson. To learn more about this celebrated artist, explore A Journey Through Art with William H. Johnson.

This year's Collectors Roundtable series was formed in part by feedback the museum received from the previous one. People wanted more Collecting 101 presentations, so this year's program was shaped with the budding collector in mind. Plus, this year the three lectures are also free, so that leaves more money to put aside for your art collection. Perhaps you'd like to start with a print?

Last week I joined guest curator Chris Melissinos at this year's Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco to present "A Day at the Museum: How the Smithsonian is Embracing Games."

This post is part of an ongoing series here on Eye Level: The Best of Ask Joan of Art. Begun in 1993, Ask Joan of Art is the longest running arts-based electronic reference service in the country. Question: What do the paintings of Stuart Davis reveal about trends or themes in America?

"It all started because of this bird pin I'm wearing," Delphine Hirasuna told us the other day at the American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery in preparation for the March 5 opening of The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942–1946.

"I'm a comic book writer, artist, and storyteller," Darwyn Cooke told us when he spoke recently at the McEvoy Auditorium about his first graphic novel, The Hunter, an adaptation of the famous crime novel written by Donald E. Westlake under the pseudonym Richard Stark.

There hasn't been a major exhibition of the works by nineteenth-century photographer Timothy H. O'Sullivan in more than thirty years, but thanks to a collaboration between the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Library of Congress, all that changes this week in a big way with the opening of the exhibition Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the creation of internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. The order—a direct result of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor the previous December, which killed thousands of Americans—placed 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps.

We usually think of Presidents' Day as celebrating the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But we found this presidential gem of President and Mrs. Eisenhower, from 1955, two years after the former five-star general took office.