SAAM Stories

We have launched two new podcasts this week: an audio podcast, The Prints of Sean Scully, (whose exhibition is on display at the museum until October 8) and our first video podcast on our Lunder Conservation Center.

Timing is everything. On my way to photograph the installation of Andrea Zittel's work for our upcoming exhibition Celebrating the Lucelia Artist Award, 2001—2006, I stopped off to see what was happening in our courtyard.

I grew up in D.C. and have always been fascinated by the architecture here. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes a muddle, and always written about by Benjamin Forgey in the Washington Post.

Jessica Stockholder is the 2007 Lucelia Artist Award winner. Stockholder works in expansive installations at a time in which the boundaries of sculpture and installation have been so greatly enlarged that even an installation the size of a room might seem modest by comparison to other artists working in the genre.

Last summer we blogged about how Morris Kantor played with perspective to fit a ballpark drama into his painting Baseball at Night, so I was fascinated to see Marjorie Phillips' painting Night Baseball on a recent trip to the Phillips Collection.

Photographic portraits of veterans are a proven entity in museums and, to my mind, photography memorializes soldiers and wars. But will these photographs always serve that function—and do they even now?

American art makes a few surprise appearances in popular music this week.

When we talk about creating Web sites or interpretive materials for the museum I always think about promoting the idea that artists aren't a clan of exotic space aliens but are regular people who look at the world, think about it, and channel their reactions and decisions into making works of art.

I didn't purchase the professional version of Smithsonian Radar when I signed on for this job ten years ago (that's reserved for our Public Affairs department who scours newspapers and magazines for all coverage of our museum). However, I frequently find myself using the open source version when I come upon our name in the media.

If his brush stroke doesn't tip you off, his subject matter will. And if by the subject matter you can't tell that George Catlin's paintings were done in the field, then seeing his buffalo bladder paint skins will put all doubt from mind.

This year marks the seventh Lucelia Artist Award, an annual award in which the Smithsonian American Art Museum recognizes an artist under age 50 for his or her contribution to contemporary art.

It's a favorite pastime of curmudgeons everywhere: Setting faux-naive paintings alongside naive paintings and asking supposed art experts to pick the real from the fake. Radar magazine gets in on the act here, daring savvy readers to prove through an online quiz that they're not faking it when they say they know what art is.

Workers are now installing radiant heating/cooling tubes and the infrastructure for the water features—yes, I said water features—in the courtyard floor.

The most significant lesson in John Hanhardt's last lecture on new media art concerned historical revisionism. Hanhardt professes that contemporary video artists—the subject of his fourth and final installment—worked with unexpected sources in their work, not merely by drawing inspiration from and references to the Western art-historical canon in the way that artists in other media do.

Ken Johnson raises several good questions in his New York Times piece, where he takes the pulse of current sculpture by discussing what's up in the galleries this month.

Looking over some Washington Post archives, I found this review by Michael O'Sullivan of a show that was up at American University's Katzen Arts Center earlier this spring.

SAAM New Media projects have just won two MUSE awards from the American Association of Museums. The MUSE awards recognize excellence in the use of media and technology in museums.

"Herman Melville's cursed wanderers, Raymond Chandler's tough guys, and Walt Whitman's solitary individualists"—that's how one art critic described H. C. Westermann's person and works, a description that captures his work as well as his biography.