SAAM Stories

Summer at SAAM is bound to heat up this week as we kick off Carnaval del Corazón, or Carnival of the Heart. This Thursday evening, July 3 from 5 to 8 p.m., join us in the skylit Kogod Courtyard for salsa demonstrations and dancing, accompanied by irresistible music from Puerto Rico and Cuba.

Greetings from Paris. I'm here for a week for the exhibition of a friend's paintings and have fallen in love all over again with this city. It's a city for the senses: everything seems a bit more alive here, a bit more full. Artists and writers (and lovers) have always been drawn to Paris. It's also an excellent place for bloggers!

Anna Deavere Smith gave the final talk in the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series. Smith spoke about a Ruth Orkin photo, Member of the Wedding, Opening Night, Ethel Waters, Carson McCullers, and Julie Harris, New York City, 1950. I never knew that a seemingly quiet photo could say so much.

Gallop! A Scanimation Picture Book is one of those books I bought for a child in my life, but was reluctant to hand it over when the fateful day came. The book mesmerized me from the start. The minute I picked it up in the museum shop, I was hooked.

On the evening of March 6, 1865, a ten dollar ticket admitted "one gentleman and two ladies" to President Lincoln's second inaugural ball, held in the very building that is now American Art: the Patent Office Building. Estimates of attendance ranged from 4,000 to 6,000 people.

The ballparks in my old stomping ground of New York are shutting their doors. The newspapers reported the impending closing of Yankee and Shea Stadiums, in the Bronx and Queens, respectively. My dad, who lived in Queens after I left for college, would meet me at Shea Stadium and we'd watch a Mets game together.

My favorite scene in the documentary on Jackson Pollock that recently arrived from Netflix was the one in which the director had the artist paint on a sheet of glass while he filmed from below. I always loved the wild whiplash of Pollock's brushstrokes but seeing it done before my eyes was kind of amazing. He splattered and dripped and it all looked incredibly deliberate. Everything fell into place. Once in a while I've stood before a Pollock, say at MOMA, and heard somebody next to me whisper, "Oh, I can do that," or worse, "My kids can do that." I'm afraid that they can't.

If you're into museums and nighttime (two of my favorite things) you should check out our kids' interactive, Meet Me At Midnight. It's a clever look at our museum after hours and what happens when the lights go out and the objects are pretty much on their own (with the guards, of course!)

We asked SAAM's Patrick Martin, to write a post about a new Web initiative from our museum’s Education department: Superhighway Scholars.

Today, I stood in front of Helen Searle's Still Life with Fruit and Champagne and thought, this spread looks pretty good for being nearly 140 years old. Searle, born in Burlington, Vermont in 1830, painted this still life when she was thirty-six.

What would you choose if someone were to ask you to pick an iconic work of art that spoke to you like no other? Apparently, when historian Gary Wills was asked to participate in the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series, he knew immediately that he'd speak about Thomas Eakins's painting, William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River.

April may be the cruelest month, if you believe T. S. Eliot. But it's also National Poetry Month, which may bring down the cruelty level by a notch or two. For me, Walt Whitman is the gold standard of American poets. In the Luce Foundation Center for American Art, he takes the bronze.

We just launched a new podcast in our museum series about our photography collection and exhibitions here at SAAM.

"Contemporary art," says Robert Storr, "is simply the most recent of modern art and modern art is an ongoing phenomenon."

"Don't call me a collector," Helen Williams Drutt said recently to an audience at the Renwick Gallery who came to view the exhibition Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection, "I consider myself an educator."

The American Art Museum mourns the loss of choreographer Merce Cunningham who died on July 26, 2009. This post was published last year as a tribute to Cunningham's creativity and ability to incorporate new methods of expression in his work.

The Kogod Courtyard, shared by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, has just been named one of seven architectural wonders of the world by Condé Nast Traveler magazine. Way to go! From the article:

With the Color as Field exhibition in full swing, I went back to take another look, and found myself returning to Sam Francis's painting, Blue Balls from 1960.