SAAM Stories

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.

The Renwick Gallery has been the American Art Museum's showcase for contemporary crafts and decorative arts since 1972, but this National Historic Landmark has its own intriguing history.

Educators from across the country came to the museum for the week-long Clarice Smith National Teacher Institute to learn how to integrate art across the curriculum. I had the pleasure of talking to fifteen of them about podcasting.

Staged Stories: Renwick Craft Invitational 2009 runs until January 3, 2010. Nicholas Bell, curator at the Renwick Gallery, introduces us to the art and artists now on exhibition.

During the dog days of August, you're in the middle of DC and want to check your email. Best thing you could do would be to head straight to American Art where you've got two options for free WiFi.

Right now in the Luce Foundation Center you can borrow a Flip Mino and shoot a video of your museum visit.

Jean Shin’s exhibition Common Threads just closed at American Art. Once a show is over, American Art’s Registrar’s Office is tasked with de-installing it.

This is the fourth in a series of personal observations about how people experience and explore museums.

Art historian and Travel Channel host Lee Sandstead welcomes each visitor at the door of the McEvoy Auditorium wearing what he called hippie pants ("genuine polyester, not the fake stuff we have today") with the effervescent greeting, "I'll be your speaker tonight." Fasten your polyester pants; it's going to be an interesting evening.

The son of a Russian immigrant, abstract painter Morris Louis grew up in Baltimore. As an adult, Louis lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, and in Washington, D.C., where, in a small bungalow on Legation Street, NW, he turned his dining room into a studio. Some of his pictures were larger than the room itself, and he had to work on folded canvas.

Joann Moser, Senior Curator, wrote the following blog post about one of our recent acquisitions to American Art's collection.

If you're walking through a city, say New York or Washington D.C., you may want to have Jean Shin by your side. You may know your way around familiar streets, but through Shin's eyes you'll be able to look at the overlooked and see how the ordinary can rise to the level of art.

Robert Motherwell, known as an intellectual painter, has sometimes been called the spokesperson for the abstract expressionist movement. He painted in a style that often involved spontaneously generated images on large fields of canvas.