SAAM Stories

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.

Bring the entire family to the museum's Kogod Courtyard on Saturday, January 24 from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. as we celebrate The Year of the Ox in style!

Greetings from D.C. where change comes every four—or sometimes eight—years. It's an interesting time to be in the nation's capital. On January 20th, our newest president will be sworn in; his election was a momentous achievement in so many ways.

What’s better than an evening at a museum while the world around you is settling down for the night: it’s magic.

Many people mistake days mentioned in the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas" for the days preceding December 25. In actuality, however, the song refers to the twelve days after Christmas.

I think of Ansel Adams as the Walt Whitman of American photography, creating "silent songs" about monumental landscapes. Georgia O'Keeffe, on the other hand, reminds me of Emily Dickinson.

"I didn't choose painting," Grace Hartigan once told an interviewer, "It chose me. I didn't have any talent. I just had genius."

We've just turned the last page on this year's calendar and it's time to count down the days remaining in 2008. To take a good look at the last month of the year, I've chosen December from Harry Cimino's Marchbanks Calendar.

George Gurney, American Art's Deputy Chief Curator, came by my desk this afternoon to tell me today marked a special occasion in the art world.

Who'd have thought that spending an hour and a half with a lawyer could be so entertaining? Local attorney Joshua Kaufman of Venable LLP enlighted the audience at American Art the other night on the legal issues of acquiring, owning, inheriting, and selling art, from the big picture to the fine print.

Is your wife begging you to part with your old Little League trophies or that shuffleboard MVP figurine from the '79 singles cruise? Furthermore, have you always wanted to be immortalized in a monumental work of art? Then New York artist Jean Shin has a project with your name on it.

December 1 is World AIDS Day as well as what was once known as A Day Without Art. That began December 1, 1989, in response to the AIDS crisis and in honor of all the artists who lost their lives or were affected by the disease.

George Elbert Burr created this menu for a Thanksgiving dinner in 1905 that included consomme, English plum pudding, charlotte russe (a dessert of cream and ladyfingers), and of course, the turkey, illustrated here in a simple pen and ink and watercolor drawing.

O'Keeffe's Manhattan was created for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. If the flowers don’t seem like typical O’Keeffe, they’re not: she based them on paper and cloth decorative flowers created by Hispanic women in New Mexico.

Fotoweek DC, a week-long celebration of photography here in the nation’s capital, is being celebrated at the American Art Museum with a series of nightly contemporary photo landscape projections on the walls of our Kogod Courtyard.