SAAM Stories

Bernice Ellis Lunder entered the Comics Quilt, featuring forty-nine characters from the funny papers, in a quilt context.

I plan to make this post the first in a series on technique and medium. Paint. The stuff that gets under the artist’s fingernails, and can barely be scrubbed away. I love paint. I love color. I love walking up to a painting and trying to decipher its DNA.

Over ten thousand people (including lots of children) attended our Friends and Family festival marking the opening of the Kogod Courtyard. Eye Level blogged a record eight stories that day (whew!), documented with many photos by us and by others (see our Flickr photostream).

With the new glass canopy in place, the courtyard itself becomes a place of changing light, in a sense, alive.

The courtyard was designed to double as a performance space, and this must have been quite a challenge to the architects.

Today, during the family festival in the new courtyard you'll be able to make Andy Warhol-like collages using cool, vibrant, colorful materials.

One of the coolest things going on this afternoon is the area where you can make your own hats. You begin by working with a basic shape of a hat but whatever else you add is really up to your own imagination.

Museum-Goers Enjoy the Opening of the Kogod Courtyard

Museum intern Mary Savig spoke with several visitors on their reasons for coming to the grand opening.

It's a little after noon on Sunday and the Kogod Courtyard is now open. The sun is shining through the beautiful new glass canopy, and it's the perfect day to spend some time listening to music or create a hands-on project with friends and/or members of your family.

SAAM's got a new Flickr group.

Mike wrote about one of the Kogod Courtyard's interesting features, a series of water scrims throughout the enclosure.

Workers putting the finishing touches on our awesome new Lord Norman Foster/Foster + Partners-designed Kogod Courtyard.

There was a huge crane outside the museum and a large truck that contained Holzer's For SAAM, her 2007 conceptual site-specific sculpture. The twenty-eight-foot piece was protected by a long crate.

If you've been in our neighborhood in the last six years or so, you've noticed the big, gray, plywood construction fences that surrounded the museum.

Jeremiah Gallay, one of SAAM’s exhibition designers, recently installed the show Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape in one of our galleries. He writes on how he chose to design the space.

Six of the seven winners of the Lucelia Artist Award have work on view in a special exhibition, Celebrating the Lucelia Artist Award, 2001–2006, on display now. Eye Level caught up with 2005 winner Andrea Zittel while she was at the museum installing A–Z Homestead Office for Lisa Ivorian Gray.

It's the dawn of the new fiscal year (ok, so you're not interested in the ways of the federal government). But in this case it means I get to introduce you to a new addition to our Eye Level team, Howard Kaplan. Howard will be joining Kriston and the rest of us blogging all things American art.