Disrupting Craft: Renwick Invitational 2018
Disrupting Craft: Renwick Invitational 2018 features essays written by the jurors that explore how each artist has used their chosen media to contribute beyond the confines of the art world.
Books
Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor
Bill Traylor (ca. 1853–1949) is regarded today as one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century.
Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen
Trevor Paglen blurs the lines between art, science, and investigative journalism to construct unfamiliar and at times unsettling ways to see and interpret the world around us.
Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs
In late 1969, Diane Arbus (1923–1971) began to work on a portfolio. She titled it A box of ten photographs.
Nation Building
Nation Building: Craft and Contemporary American Culture brings together twenty voices leading the current dialogue about critical craft studies.
The Civil War and American Art
The Civil War redefined America and forever changed American art. The war’s grim reality, captured through the new medium of photography, was laid bare. American artists could not glamorize the hero on the battlefield.
The Great American Hall of Wonders
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
Craft for a Modern World
Craft for a Modern World presents 150 of the Renwick Gallery’s 2,000 artworks in a new light, celebrating the restoration and reopening of its historic landmark home.
George Catlin’s American Buffalo
Artist George Catlin journeyed west five times in the 1830s, traversing the Great Plains and visiting more than 140 American Indian tribes. In hundreds of canvases, Catlin recorded the lifeways of Plains Indians, including illustrating massive herds of buffalo and their importance in daily life.
In Search of the Corn Queen: American Scene series, No.1
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.
A Measure of the Earth
A Measure of the Earth provides an window into the traditional basketry revival of the past fifty years.
Spanish Harlem ("American Scene" series, No. 3)
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.
WONDER
WONDER celebrates the renovation and reopening of the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery with an immersive web of magic.
American Louvre
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.
Modern Masters: American Abstraction at Midcentury
Modern Masters: American Abstraction at Midcentury features more than thirty artists who transformed American art in the years after World War II. Seventy artworks from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, reproduced in full color, convey the dynamism and raw energy of the period.
Crosscurrents: Modern Art from the Sam Rose and Julie Walters Collection
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
Contemporary Folk Art: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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.
Harlem Heroes: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten
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.
Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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
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.