Smithsonian American Art Museum
Sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) made works that “speak of both the modern and the ancient in the same breath.” An essay by Dakin Hart traces themes in Noguchi’s sixty-year career—an expansive vision that ranged from landscape art to garden and playground designs, from sculptures featuring plan
Painter, photographer, and printmaker Yasuo Kuniyoshi immigrated to the United States from Japan in 1906 and began a journey through New York City, Europe, and Japan that forged his unique painting style.
The year was 1830, and the American West was entering a phase of rapid transformation. Passage of the Indian Removal Act commenced the twelve-year migration of American Indians from lands east of the Mississippi River.
For more than sixty years, June Schwarcz (1918–2015) advanced the art of enameling—fusing glass to metal through a high-temperature firing process—while creating works that combine rich textures and luminous color.June Schwarcz: Invention & Variation celebrates this pioneering artist with fifty-nine full-color plates representing a wide selection of her work, from traditional vessels and boxes to wall-mounted panels and modernist sculpture.
Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum commemorates Treasures to Go, a series of eight exhibitions from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, touring the nation through 2002.
American Impressionism: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum commemorates Treasures to Go, a series of eight exhibitions from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, touring the nation through 2002.
This in-depth look at a renowned collection, ranging from bottlecap giraffes and wood carvings to hand-sewn quilts, provides a new understanding of folk art, recognizing its achievements as an essential part of America’s visual heritage.
From its earliest stirrings as a republic to the information age, America has been a country of triumph and struggle, imagination and innovation.
This lavishly illustrated history of America’s Patent Office Building illuminates the importance of a treasured national landmark. Today the building is home to two Smithsonian museums, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.
This full-color catalogue provides a rare insight into a stunning private collection of American Art. Hugh and Marie Halff, connoisseurs based in San Antonio, Texas, have read, studied, and traveled widely in their quest.
Earl Cunningham (1893–1977) was one of the premier folk artists of the twentieth century. Earl Cunningham’s America presents Cunningham as a folk modernist who used the flat space and brilliant color typical of Matisse and Van Gogh to create sophisticated compositions.
Over a period of fifty years, William T. Wiley has distinguished himself by creating an extensive body of work that challenges the precepts of mainstream art.
Few photographers have captured more compelling images of the untamed American West than Timothy H. O’Sullivan.
Norman Rockwell’s pictures tell stories—of children growing up and of couples growing old—that make us laugh with warmhearted recognition. Rockwell was a master humorist with an infallible sense of the dramatic moment.
A Revolution in Wood celebrates the gift of sixty-six pieces of turned and carved wood to the Renwick Gallery by the distinguished collectors Fleur and Charles Bresler.
Lure of the West: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum commemorates Treasures to Go, a series of eight exhibitions from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, touring the nation through 2002.
The striking design of this book showcases a comprehensive survey of the world’s largest collection of works by American artists, ranging from colonial limners to the contemporary avant-garde.
African American Masters focuses on black artists whose efforts in the twentieth century demonstrate their command of mainstream traditions as well as the open assertion and exploration of their dual heritage.
In the 1920s, inspired perhaps by the particular light and quality of Gloucester, Massachusetts, Edward Hopper began painting watercolors. He has been celebrated since then as one of the most eloquent of America’s realists.
A prolific landscape record evolved as soon as cameras and equipment could be reliably used outdoors. Most nineteenth-century photographers worked on government-sponsored surveys. Others helped to lure investors westward with the images they made along the routes of the railroads.
Graphic Masters celebrates the extraordinary variety and accomplishment of American artists’ works on paper.
40 Under 40: Craft Futures examines the expanding role of the handmade in contemporary culture through the work of the next generation of artists.
The craft object creates a link between the forming hands of its maker and the hands and mind of its user.
In the nineteenth century, people from all walks of life embraced the new medium of photography with unparalleled enthusiasm. For artist and inventor Samuel F. B.
Author Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964) began making portraits in 1932. Over the next three decades, he asked writers, musicians, athletes, politicians, and others to sit for him—many of them central figures in the Harlem Renaissance.
In eighty-eight striking paintings and sculptures, Crosscurrents captures modernism as it moved from early abstractions by O’Keeffe, to Picasso and Pollock in midcentury, to pop riffs on contemporary culture by Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Thiebaud, and Tom Wesselmann—all illustrating the com
Designed by James Renwick Jr. in 1858, the building that houses the Renwick Gallery was the first in the United States conceived expressly as a public art museum.
WONDER celebrates the renovation and reopening of the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery with an immersive web of magic.
A Measure of the Earth provides an window into the traditional basketry revival of the past fifty years.
Contemporary Folk Art: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum commemorates “Treasures to Go,” a series of eight exhibitions from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which toured the nation through 2002.
Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum commemorates Treasures to Go, a series of eight exhibitions from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, touring the nation through 2002.
Young America: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum commemorates “Treasures to Go,” a series of eight exhibitions from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which toured the nation through 2002.
The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum commemorates Treasures to Go, a series of eight exhibitions from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, touring the nation through 2002.
The American Art Forum, a small group of collectors from across the United States, was begun twenty years ago by Charles C. Eldredge while he was director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Often called the great corridor of America’s westward expansion, in the nineteenth century the Great Platte River Road carried wagon trains and settlers through Nebraska Territory to points farther west.
The eighty-four pieces of studio furniture owned by the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum constitute one of the largest assemblages of American studio furniture in the nation.
During the Great Depression, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised a “new deal for the American people,” initiating government programs to foster economic recovery. Roosevelt’s pledge to help “the forgotten man” also embraced America’s artists.
The six artists whose earthy, urban subjects led critics to call them the “Ashcan School” are featured in this book. The authors document how closely the work of these artists reflected current events and social concerns at the turn of the century.
Inspired by nineteenth-century landscape painting, science-fiction film, and firsthand study, Rockman’s paintings proffer a vision of the natural world that is equal parts fantasy and empirical fact.
The Great American Hall of Wonders is a vividly illustrated survey of the American ingenuity that energized all aspects of nineteenth-century society, from the painting of landscapes and scenes of everyday life to the planning of scientific expedition and the development of new mechanica
Greta Pratt returns to the county fairs of her childhood in the American Midwest, creating photographs that capture the spirit of rural life in the region.
Joseph Rodriguez’s color photographs bring the reader inside Spanish Harlem, where he documents not only the grim realities of drug abuse, AIDS, and crime in New York’s oldest barrio, but also its vibrant street life.
Nation Building: Craft and Contemporary American Culture brings together twenty voices leading the current dialogue about critical craft studies.