Howard Kaplan

Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg shows us how Rockwell went to great lengths to stage his pictures, laboring over costumes for each figure and the individual props that added to the story he wanted the viewer to understand at a glance.

Of all the stories of internees in the relocation camps for Japanese Americans during World War II, Isamu Noguchi's was the most unusual.

When I typed "birds" into American Art's search engine, I was able to view multiple artists' different takes on the natural world. I came across Seacoast and Flying Birds, a colorful woodblock print by Frances H. Gearhart (1869-1958), and decided to explore the work of an artist I knew nothing about.

I always wondered what it would be like to compose a score for particular artworks in the collection of American Art. Clearly a late- nineteenth-century painting by Thomas Wilmer Dewing would sound different from a meditative Mark Rothko work painted seventy years later.

American artist Louise Bourgeois died on Monday, May 31, at the age of ninety-eight. Born in France to parents who made their living repairing tapestries, she moved to New York City in 1938 and lived and worked there for the rest of her life.

For me, the name Louis Comfort Tiffany conjures up images of art glass, opulence, and the mystique of the Gilded Age. But I had no idea that he was also a photographer and gained some amount of renown for his images. I love this one, an albumen print entitled Fishermen Unloading a Boat, Sea Bright, New Jersey, taken in 1887.

This year's Collectors' Roundtable Series concluded the other evening with a spirited presentation by Richard Kelly, who showed us the ins and outs (as well as the oohs and ahhhs) of building a collection of illustrations.

Our closer look at the exhibition, The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese Internment Camps, 1942-1946, continues with The Vest with a Thousand Knots.

"That is not me," Jules Feiffer said, referring to the Bob Landry black-and-white photograph of an elegantly dressed Fred Astaire performing "Puttin' on the Ritz" from the 1946 movie Blue Skies. Feiffer spoke recently on Landry's photograph in the museum's McEvoy auditorium as part of the American Pictures lecture series, which pairs works of art with leading figures of contemporary American culture.

Filmmakers Albert Maysles and his brother, David (who died in 1987), are recognized as masters of "direct cinema," the American cousin of French "cinéma vérité." They first met Christo and Jeanne-Claude in the early 1960s and filmed many of their works over the decades, including two that will be screened at American Art's McEvoy Auditorium on April 29, at 6:30 pm: Valley Curtain (1973) and Christo in Paris (1986).

In the second of three Collectors' Roundtable lectures this spring, Elmerina and Dr. Paul Parkman and John T. Kotelly led a spirited conversation on collecting contemporary craft. All three share a passion for studio arts and related stories of how they began collecting, what they've acquired since, and how once the collecting bug strikes, your life may never be the same.

With the opening of the much-anticipated exhibition Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence, Eye Level had a chance to speak with Christo about the making of the original outdoor installation, Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972-76.

American Art holds an important collection of works by William H. Johnson. To learn more about this celebrated artist, explore A Journey Through Art with William H. Johnson.

This year's Collectors Roundtable series was formed in part by feedback the museum received from the previous one. People wanted more Collecting 101 presentations, so this year's program was shaped with the budding collector in mind. Plus, this year the three lectures are also free, so that leaves more money to put aside for your art collection. Perhaps you'd like to start with a print?

"It all started because of this bird pin I'm wearing," Delphine Hirasuna told us the other day at the American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery in preparation for the March 5 opening of The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942–1946.

"I'm a comic book writer, artist, and storyteller," Darwyn Cooke told us when he spoke recently at the McEvoy Auditorium about his first graphic novel, The Hunter, an adaptation of the famous crime novel written by Donald E. Westlake under the pseudonym Richard Stark.

There hasn't been a major exhibition of the works by nineteenth-century photographer Timothy H. O'Sullivan in more than thirty years, but thanks to a collaboration between the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Library of Congress, all that changes this week in a big way with the opening of the exhibition Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the creation of internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. The order—a direct result of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor the previous December, which killed thousands of Americans—placed 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps.

We usually think of Presidents' Day as celebrating the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But we found this presidential gem of President and Mrs. Eisenhower, from 1955, two years after the former five-star general took office.

This Valentine's Day, love may be in the air, but it's also found its way into the museum. We've had canoodling sightings in the Kogod Courtyard, and even a highly romantic marriage proposal in one of the galleries (and the good news is that she said yes!).