SAAM Stories

Season's Greetings, an exhibition from the Archives of American Art, features holiday cards made by artists, many of whose works are in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but doesn't the frame have an equally interesting story to tell? Martin Kotler, frames conservator at American Art, led an enthusiastic group through Frames 101 the other day in the Renwick Gallery's Grand Salon.

Forty years ago, German-born American artist Werner Drewes created this colorful woodcut in honor of what may be the most typically American holiday. I like it for its vivid lines, burst of energy, and full-blown spectrum, especially the use of the color purple.

When I heard that artist Jeanne-Claude had died, I went back to the blog post I wrote last year about her visit to American Art with her other half, Christo. Together, as husband and wife and as artists, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been reinventing the contemporary art landscape for more than fifty years with their installations such as wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf in Paris, and of course, Running Fence, their monumental project in Northern California from the 1970s.

Recently, American Art staff member Tierney Sneeringer was very excited to conduct her first Spanish tour, welcoming the "Friends of the Canal Museum" to the Luce Foundation Center.

Roy DeCarava, an American master, died October 27, 2009, a few weeks shy of his ninetieth birthday. Born in Harlem in 1919, and coming to adulthood during the Harlem Renaissance, DeCarava became a photographer of the street and the people who inhabited that day-to-day world.

You've seen the William T. Wiley exhibition. Now play the game! What, you haven't seen the show yet? Well, now's your opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

Our exhibitions' team was up and at ‘em early on October 27 to unpack and reinstall sculptor Albert Paley’s Portal Gates at the museum's Renwick Gallery.

"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.