SAAM Stories

For a moment I felt an intense flashback to my college days: I walked into the auditorium, took my seat, and was handed a five-page handout listing slides and films that would be shown (complete with a bibliography for the lecture). A reporter's notebook seemed suddenly small for the note-taking task.

In This Case is a series of periodic posts on art in the Luce Foundation Center, a visible art storage facility at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that displays more than 3,300 pieces in fifty-seven cases.

The upcoming exhibition of Sean Scully's prints puts me in mind of a conversation I had some time ago with an artist. This artist's paintings were (and still are) greatly in demand, but they're not the only work that he does.

Tuesday, May 15, John Hanhardt, SAAM's new Senior Media Arts Curator, begins his lecture series about the history and directions of media arts in the U.S. We on the Web team are pretty excited about having John as a colleague and though he's quite well known in the field this is a bit of a coming out for him and SAAM's media arts program in DC.

We've just launched our third podcast. This one is about art and the American West.

Some noteworthy events this week: a lecture by New Yorker cartoonist Matthew Diffee, a discussion with glass artist Beth Lipman at the Renwick (Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street, NW), and a screening of Seven Days in May.

When Washington-area museums and galleries celebrate in tandem the legacy of the Washington Color School during ColorField.remix, one road will be painted to honor the contributions of one of the city's favorite sons, Gene Davis.

We’ve decided that you might appreciate an occasional FYI about upcoming events—as long as we don’t spam you with PR. Stay tuned as we tweak this feature and leave us a comment if you love it, hate it, or have suggestions.

Tomorrow at 3:00 p.m., Chief Curator Eleanor Harvey hosts a discussion with artists William Christenberry, David Bates, Betye Saar, and David Beck.

Karoline von Günderode is not a name you'd expect to pop up in modern art—she was a minor German Romantic poet. Her history, however, is fascinating, marked by fatal longing. After being refused romantically by the philologist Friedrich Creuzer, von Günderode succumbed to suicide. She was immortalized by her friend Bettina Brentano, who compiled and published their correspondence with the poet's verse.

Though it opened in fall last year, Perspectives, a mini-retrospective of Simryn Gill's work at the Sackler Gallery, complements the spring Craft Invitational at the Renwick. One piece in the Sackler show represents another way that artists commonly approach craft: they reconsider design and craft objects using unfamiliar materials.

I was bound and determined to avoid Second Life as long as possible, but it seems just as determined to invade First Life.

Julie Heath, the programs coordinator for the Lunder Conservation Center, sent us a heads up about this event.

After a late March snowfall, spring made its glorious debut, tempting this winter homebody to take a pleasant stroll through northwest D.C. down to the National Mall. One of the shows in bloom is the 2007 Craft Invitational at the Renwick Gallery, a show of artists working in media often associated with craft (paper, glass, and clay).

In a recent post on his Time blog, Richard Lacayo makes a strong point while discussing the Armando Reverón exhibit at MoMA.

The Wave Field, completed by Maya Lin in 1995 for the University of Michigan, incorporates two landscapes. There's obviously the physical landscape into which it's built, a 10,000-square-foot patch of earth. But Lin's also addressed a sort of social landscape by designing the piece to correspond with aerospace engineering concepts.

On my way through the museum this morning I found this construction scene of the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard. Norman Foster's canopy is almost complete except for one hole that will remain open until the completion of the floor and landscaping in November of this year.

The AIA's Twenty-five Year Award honors architectural structures that have stood for twenty-five to thirty-five years and have shown lasting importance to the culture throughout. Artdaily reports that AIA selected Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial for the 2007 award.