Bridget Callahan

If you've been following Eye Level for a while, you won't be surprised to know we love Nam June Paik. We celebrate his birthday every summer and held a comprehensive exhibition of more than 60 of his artworks, some of which were on public view for the first time. This month, we completed the installation of the Paik Archive case in the Luce Foundation Center. If you were able to see the exhibition you might remember some of these pieces from our Paik archive wall, including the sitting red Buddha and four martial arts figurines.

During the past year, regular visitors to the American Art Museum might have noticed certain galleries on our second floor were temporarily closed. The reason? Our curators, exhibition team, and collections managers had undertaken the challenge of reinstalling about half of the galleries on the floor.

Mousetrap, one of the patent models now in American Art's collection.

This month marks my six-year anniversary as a Luce Foundation Center employee. Since I became the Center's program coordinator last year, I've been spending less and less time in the Center itself. While I miss regularly interacting with visitors, I think what I miss most is being able to brag about having the prettiest office in Washington.

Eyes: they've been called windows to the soul and are often one of the first things we notice when meeting someone new. They can betray our emotions and give us away when we're not being truthful or when we want to hide the truth.

I have a confession. I like vending machines a little too much. The convenience, the multitude of options, the opportunity to empty out my change purse—what's not to love?

How many of you, as youngsters, wanted to be a superhero when you grew up? I wonder if sculptor Bret Price had any such aspirations.

I first experienced Albert Pinkham Ryder's work through slides projected onto a dingy classroom wall and tiny images reprinted in my college textbook on nineteenth-century American art. Needless to say, neither of these methods of reproduction did his work justice.

The Luce Center staff can be a fairly competitive bunch: which of our scavenger hunts gets the most participants or which audio tour stops do visitors listen to most often. But lately, we’ve extended our competition to our ongoing Fill the Gap project where we ask you to help us fill the empty space in one of our cases when an artwork goes on exhibition, loan, or to our conservation center.

Many art history students are taught to look closely at portraits to derive meaning from the subject’s body language, the other objects the artist includes, and even they way these objects are arranged. The Luce Foundation Center has a wonderful portrait, Godly Susan, which is a perfect subject for this kind of close reading.

Luce Foundation Center staff are very excited about our new digital imaging project, which will create three-dimensional images of some of our artworks. Our objects are safe in their cases, but the glass barriers don't really allow our visitors to fully experience what's inside.

It's part of my job at the Luce Center for American Art's information desk to explain the concept of the Center to visitors. But I can tell how eager they are to begin exploring when, midway through our conversation, their eyes begin to wander. If they happen to notice a particular case in the craft section, the next question I hear is frequently, "Are those quilts?"

What do Mickey Mouse, a lobster, and a football player all have in common? Give up? They can all be found in Lloyd G. Schermer’s An American Puzzle!

I’m not sure why I like art that incorporates found objects so much. Maybe it’s the idea of someone’s trash being someone else’s treasure. Maybe it’s the unique experience that is created through a combination of ordinary items. Mostly, though, it’s the stories that these objects can tell, both individually and as parts of a larger whole.