SAAM Stories

On a recent Saturday afternoon writer Jamaica Kincaid offered ninety minutes of personal remembrances in one of the most interesting and heartfelt presentations in the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture series. Although she started, hesitated, then began again, you couldn't help but be on her side. "I'm thinking of this as a dress rehearsal," she said, after trying to get her powerpoint to behave, "because if this works, I'm taking it on the road."

Laura had the great fortune to talk about Paik and the Archive with one of the world’s leading experts on Paik, John G. Hanhardt, who is the Museum’s consulting senior curator of film and media art.

Last week, we began to install works by the artist Jean Shin for an exhibition titled Jean Shin: Common Threads that opens on May 1st. The artworks being assembled promise to be compelling.

I recently discovered a side of Abraham Lincoln I didn't know too much about: our sixteenth president was a nineteenth-century technophile. Not only is he the only president to this day to have a patented invention (come'on President Obama, your turn), he used then-new technology to help win the Civil War.

The Hallmark Photo Collection (yes, that Hallmark) began in the early 1960s, and was even displayed in a gallery on the ground level of their flagship store in Manhattan. Keith F. Davis joined the Hallmark Fine Art Collection in 1979, when its holdings included about 2500 photos. By 2006, when Hallmark donated the collection to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City (where Davis was named curator of photography), the collection boasted 6500 photos by 900 different photographers.

You arrive in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Luce Foundation Center and are presented with a problem; the museum is haunted and we need YOUR help to banish the mischievous spirits. To do this, you need to complete three quests as part of our large-scale multimedia scavenger hunt, Ghosts of a Chance.

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.