SAAM Stories

ArtBabble, the online art video service from the Indianapolis Museum of Art that launched today, has raised the bar even higher, and gives the museum incredible new tools for presenting contemporary artists’ ever-growing repertoire of stylistic and narrative innovations online.

This morning I found Alex Katz in a very unusual place: my J. Crew catalogue, which faithfully arrived with its usual thud in today's mail.

"You make me feel so respectable," writer and filmmaker John Waters wryly remarked after a rousing welcome to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, then added, "We'll see what we can do about it." Baltimore-native Waters, best known for his films Hairspray and Pink Flamingos, spoke, if not performed, at the McEvoy Auditorium, as the inaugural speaker in the second annual American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series.

Looking at the painting and the photo together reminds me of the experience of watching a landscape artist work en plein air and glancing back and forth between the canvas and the subject. In between lies the vast world of interpretation.

Not having grown up a joystick jockey, Cory Arcangel's lecture and work, presented at the American Art Museum on Thursday March 5, helped me ‘get' video games for the first time. You can see clips from his presentation on American Art's YouTube Channel.

Inspired by the recent Smithsonian 2.0 conference, we've been thinking about new ways to engage visitors to the Luce Foundation Center in a conversation. We hope the Fill the Gap activity, which asks the public to help us make decisions, will encourage dialogue about the collections and reveal some of the inner workings of the museum!

Two things immediately struck me about the new exhibition at American Art, 1934: A New Deal for Artists. First, I was surprised to learn that the Public Works of Art Project, or PWAP, the first of President Roosevelt's relief programs for artists, lasted just seven months. Second, these artworks, done around the time of the Great Depression (as opposed to the Great Recession of current times), are rich in color and speak of a world trying to look forward rather than forced to look back.

Many art history students are taught to look closely at portraits to derive meaning from the subject’s body language, the other objects the artist includes, and even they way these objects are arranged. The Luce Foundation Center has a wonderful portrait, Godly Susan, which is a perfect subject for this kind of close reading.

Lots of museum work takes place behind the scenes, so that when you visit, you can enjoy the exhibitions, lectures, or public programs. Everything is in its place: curators curate, conservators conserve, and bloggers blog. (I just threw that last one in there for a little attention.) Actually, there's a lot more to it than that.

Last Saturday nearly 10,000 people visited American Art to witness sweet history in the making. Zilly Rosen's 5,600-cupcake presidential portrait wowed folks up on the balconies in the Luce Foundation Center, stretching over an 11' x 17' area of the concourse below.

Here at the Luce Foundation Center we love using technology to add to our visitor's experience of the 3,400 objects housed here in visible storage.

On Thursday evening, January 29, photographer Frank Gohlke presented Stories in the Dirt, Stories in the Air, a program of selected readings followed by conversation with American Art's Curator of Photography, Toby Jurovics. The exhibition of Gohlke's work, Accommodating Nature, is on view at the museum through March 3.

In This Case is a series of posts on art in the Luce Foundation Center for the Study of American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. This piece was written by Jill Paschal, an intern here at the Luce Center this past year.

Craving something sweet, but feeling too chilly to stand in line at Georgetown Cupcake? Make a note on your calendar to visit the American Art Museum with your loved ones on Valentine’s Day and you’ll be part of a lucky crowd that gets to see artist Zilly Rosen’s confectionery composition of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama, made from more than 5,000 cupcakes!

Calling all DC photographers! Ever daydream what it would be like to be a museum photographer? (Sure you have.) Well, here's your chance to help American Art illustrate Wikipedia articles with images from our collection (and you might win prizes in the process).

Paul Feeley's sculpture Jack is a visitor favorite at The Luce Foundation Center. In fact, it's one of the objects people want to reach out and touch. And probably more would do so if it weren't for the sign that asks you not to. What is it about Jack?

Luce Foundation Center staff are very excited about our new digital imaging project, which will create three-dimensional images of some of our artworks. Our objects are safe in their cases, but the glass barriers don't really allow our visitors to fully experience what's inside.

Artists have been capturing all the different moods of light for millennia. American artists such as members of the Hudson River School, or the American impressionists, managed to capture light as a way of defining the landscape.