SAAM Stories

One of Chicago's contemporary galleries hosts the photography of Harvey Opgenorth. In his Museum Camouflage series, his guerilla tactics appropriate museum-hung masterworks by artists ranging from Christopher Wool to Henri Matisse: he stands in front of the works wearing clothing painted to match the compositions and photographs the result.

Two paintings from the Luce Center deserve mention together—not merely because each is an example from the American vein of Symbolist painting, but because both depict light in unnatural ways.

If you're a Big City museum and you want your visitors to be able to find you easily, it's a good thing if the cab drivers in your Big City know where you are. So the marketing wizards at SAAM and the National Portrait Gallery orchestrated an event for cabbies yesterday morning.

American Art in a Global Context: An International Symposium has just started, and we're Webcasting live from our Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium. We'll have a permanent link to today's Webcast on the site tomorrow morning, and Friday's and Saturday's events will be Webcast and archived also.

. . . to be recognized via secret nomination as a genius and rewarded $100,000 per year for the next five years—money to do with as your genius mind pleases? Those of us who will spend yet another year toiling in obscurity, waiting for our shot, may gaze in admiration upon the winners of this year's MacArthur Awards.

In September's Atlantic Monthly, libertarian technology writer and general aesthete Virginia Postrel writes about the transformation that neon lights have undergone over the course of the century—"from marketing tool to tacky trash to folk art," reads the tagline.

SAAM conservator Hugh Shockey has been hard at work conserving John Rogers' Taking the Oath and Drawing Rations.

Visitors may be surprised to learn that this glorious cityscape of Manhattan, hanging in our first-floor galleries, is by Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), an artist known for her haunting desert landscapes and floral paintings.

Note that the image you see here is not a picture of One, Two, Three by Sol LeWitt, but rather of the maquette for the sculpture. The realized piece is approximately thirty feet in length; it sits in the James Hanley Federal Building in Syracuse (no link available). The much smaller maquette (about twenty-three inches in length) is located here.

The news that the Smithsonian Institution has launched the Smithsonian Photography Initiative is very welcome indeed (even if it means I'm looking forward to some late nights in front of the laptop).

Getting tired of mobs of tourists wherever you travel this summer? Paul Cadmus could relate. He created Bar Italia to satirize the tourist crowds in Italy, where he lived and worked in the early 1950s.

The "Week Ahead" column in the Sunday, August 13, New York Times notes a Joseph Cornell exhibiton at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, New York. Holland Cotter's brief description imparts some of the magic and wonder of Cornell's work.

A friend who works in the Senate offered to meet me in the Hart Building before heading over to show me around some special collections rooms at the Library of Congress.

George Catlin (about whom Eye Level has written before) composed naturalist paintings on the trail that necessarily required a quick touch.

The prince and president, surrounded by various dignitaries, may be the focus of this group portrait, but it's the image of George Washington that makes this painting especially interesting. His profile is outlined in the clouds (hint: look in the middle of painting, between the two groups of trees), as if implying the first president's presence at the joint British/American visit to his tomb.

For a behind-the-scenes look at museum blogging in general and Eye Level in particular, take a look at Now on exhibit, the blogger's view in Sunday's Los Angeles Times.

Gene Davis's Two Part Blue was given to American Art in the ‘90s as part of the late artist’s estate. The painting came with a surprise: it seemed to have some white accretions on its surface.

From the NYT write-up of the new design for the Parrish Art Museum in Long Island: