SAAM Stories

Marilyn with Andy Warhol's Marilyn
07/01/2006
Visitors to The National Portrait Gallery can see Andy Warhol's famous portrait of Marilyn Monroe.
Joanna
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07/01/2006
Offset from the modern/contemporary Lincoln Gallery is a dark room (the kind of museum space in which you might watch a video piece) where David Hockney's 1995–96 Snails Space With Vari-Lites, "Painting as Performance" is installed.
Kriston
The crowds await the opening of SAAM and NPG.
07/01/2006
A crowd of hundreds waited outside, everyone hoping to be the first to enter. Waving fans and folded papers, people were surely eager to escape the heat from today's bright sunshine. There was goofy entertainment aplenty; actors dressed as George and Martha Washington and Uncle Sam chatted up the crowd, and two people dressed as the iconic father and daughter from Grant Wood's American Gothic waved down from a portico.
Kriston
SAAM Reopening American Gothic
07/01/2006
Venerable American Art Icons Await the Opening of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
SAAM Staff
Blog Editor
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06/30/2006
Performances, demonstrations, and talks will mark the opening of the museum tomorrow. Assuming you have some interest in also seeing the art that’s on display, here’s a list of works that deserve your attention:
Kriston
SAAM and NPG building
06/30/2006
Tomorrow, a really wonderful thing happens, and though we’ve thought about it for days and months and years, now that the moment is here it’s hard to know quite what to say.
Michael
Image Not Available
06/30/2006
Tomorrow Eye Level moves its operations from our offices to the museum. We’ll be blogging live throughout the day, documenting the opening for posterity and, of course, for those of you who can’t be here in person. We’ll also be hosting the folks from DCist, who are joining us for the day.
Kriston
Trumpeters Museum Reopening
06/29/2006
There are just a few staffers who were here in January 2000 when SAAM closed for renovation. I was one of them. July 2006 seemed far away back then —very abstract.
SAAM Staff
Blog Editor
Luce Center
06/27/2006
Visitors to our Luce Foundation Center for American Artwill see visible storage cases holding some 3300 works, including this case of Southwestern art featuring Kenneth M. Adams' Juan Duran
SAAM Staff
Blog Editor
SAAM Reopening John Roberts
06/23/2006
Smithsonian Institution Secretary Larry Small, Smithsonian American Art Museum director Elizabeth Broun, and National Portrait Gallery director Marc Pachter assembled Wednesday for the dedication of the building that houses the two museums: the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture.
Kriston
Preparing SAAM for its reopening
06/22/2006
We open in just nine days and everything is falling into place. Look behind the scenes at final artwork installations and finishing touches.
Cassandra
Edible Columns
06/21/2006
Yesterday, when Smithsonian Secretary Larry Small pronounced Patty Collette’s winning entry a “spectacular creation,” he wasn’t referring to a contest in a medium commonly associated with the visual arts. This was a battle among cakes. Three prominent pastry chefs were invited to the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture to create cakes inspired by the design of the historic building, in celebration of our grand opening July 1st.
Cassandra
Image Not Available
06/20/2006
Born in El Paso and an alumnus of the University of Texas at Austin, Jiménez made sculpture that coupled a Pop medium (fiberglass) with traditional Southwestern themes. His work drew from the cultural poles of Mexico City and New York City, both places where he worked and studied, and he was greatly influenced by public artists such as Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. The artist sought to bring Native American, Mexican, and Chicano figures to the fore in works that pay heed to classical sculptural values.
Kriston
Lincoln Gallery and model
06/19/2006
Down the hall from my office is a room full of highly detailed scale models of every SAAM gallery in the museum. The models began taking shape two summers ago.
Michael
Vaquero installation
Behind-the-Scenes 06/18/2006
On Thursday, SAAM preparators reinstalled Luis Jiménez’s Vaquero at the north entrance of the building.
SAAM Staff
Blog Editor
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06/15/2006
Luis was a close friend to many people here at SAAM and his Vaquero, long installed at our north entrance, is a symbol of the museum.
Michael
Working on Paik's Electronic Superhighway
Behind-the-Scenes 06/10/2006
Somebody was working on Nam June Paik's Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii yesterday. Those are sections of the lower Mississippi river attached to the gray plywood crate on the floor.
Michael Edson
Maxfield Parrish, Daybreak
06/07/2006
In your hurry to cut out of work early before Memorial Day, fill up the cooler, and head toward sunnier climes, you might have missed the news about the rather extraordinary sale of Maxfield Parrish’s Daybreak at Christie’s Important American Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture auction.
Kriston