SAAM Stories

"My ten millionth grandfather was Jonathan Edwards," critic Dave Hickey told us last week as part of the Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture Series at American Art. He added, "But I'm not going to give you any of that." What he did give us, instead, was a thought-provoking hour on the nature of contemporary art in America and how ideals of art and the artist in society were shaped centuries ago.

"What kind of highway signs did they have in Minnesota in 1934?" was just one of the questions Ann Prentice Wagner, guest curator of the exhibition 1934: A New Deal for Artists, needed to answer to place the paintings in context. "I was asking and answering questions of the kind that I hadn't had previously," Wagner told an enthusiastic audience who attended her lecture the other night at American Art.

For the ghostly and ghoulish among you, I found Helen Hyde's Goblin Lanterns of 1906. The artist, born in New York in 1868, moved with her family to San Francisco two years later, where her father prospered in a business associated with the gold rush.

Earlier this week I was saddened to read in an email that sculptor Ruth Duckworth had passed away at ninety on October 18th.

How long does it take to really see a work of art? Some visitors to American Art's Slow Art event this past Saturday had a go at answering that question and then discussed the artworks they had taken a long look at in the museum.

Leah Rand interned this past summer and was co-curator for the exhibition Hard Times: 1929–1939, organized by the Archives of American Art, which is on view through November 8th in the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery on the first floor of the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture.

This month, Slow Art will take place at sixteen museums around the world. I asked Georgina Goodlander and her staff at the Luce Foundation Center if they'd be interested in hosting an event at American Art. At Slow Art meetups, a group of people come together and spend quality time looking at art.

The Grammy Award-winning Afro-Cuban jazz septet, Afro Bop Alliance, has been a leading name in the Mid-Atlantic jazz scene for years. On Thursday, October 15, they return to American Art for Take 5! with three albums and a WAMMIE award under their belts as well. I was thrilled to catch up with band leader and drummer, Joe McCarthy, and asked him five questions.

“So we’ll see what happens when it gets dark,” William T. Wiley said after introductory remarks at the McEvoy Auditorium the other night to inaugurate the 2009 Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art at the museum, and the lights were dimmed.

Jo Ann Gillula is Chief of our External Affairs department. Ken Burns's latest documentary on our national parks gave her a chance to reflect on some of our country's greatest nineteenth-century artists.

To make her point that "museums are a place of theater," Kate Bonansinga, curator of Staged Stories: Renwick Craft Invitational 2009, began her introductory comments for the Artists' Roundtable on September 25th with an image of Charles Willson Peale's famous self-portrait where he lifts a thick red curtain to reveal his natural history museum. "It's all theater," Bonansinga added, "and that's the point that I'm interested in making."

The concept of mobile content in museums has been around for a long time. The first museum audio tour was in 1952! Over the last decade or so, advances in mobile technology have allowed museums to offer multimedia content on a variety of handheld devices. In 2004, we implemented a successful pilot multimedia PDA tour at our Renwick Gallery.

Fully one-quarter of the painters depicted in the exhibition 1934: A New Deal for Artists were first-generation Americans: born elsewhere, but came to the United States in search of the American dream.

Native Americans really did use every part of the bison. Your kids can find fun facts like this and more at the Art Cart in a gallery of George Catlin artworks on the second floor of American Art.

Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and, starting September 15, Hispanic Heritage Month are all good ways to celebrate the accomplishments of our country’s people and cultures.

Say you bought a painting from a London junk store fifty years ago. It's been hanging in your house all this time. You think it might be an old Dutch-period painting, and you think it's in good condition, but you aren’t sure. What would you do? You could wait for the Antiques Roadshow to come to your town. Or you could make a personal appointment with our conservators during one of our monthly Lunder Conservation Center Conservation Clinics. That's what Arline and Malcolm Martin did.

Yoko Oshio is just a knitting newbie but that didn’t stop her from sitting down to knit and purl at the Renwick Gallery’s first Sit ‘n’ Knit. As part of American Art’s Staged Stories: Renwick Craft Invitational 2009 knitting volunteers, both experienced and not, will help complete a project started by artist Mark Newport over the next two months.

"How does a guy who doesn't like to be in public end up on stage in a full-body acrylic costume knitting things?" asks fiber artist Mark Newport, one of the four artists in Staged Stories, this year's Renwick Craft Invitational.