Howard Kaplan

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!).

For almost a week now I have been trying to write about the devastating earthquake in Haiti from the point of view of art and culture, but it didn't seem right—or, at least, not the right time. With so many lives lost or destroyed, and with people still missing, what could I possibly say about paintings and sculpture that would be up to the task?

The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery recently acquired Karen LaMonte’s Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery. LaMonte, a glass artist, went to Prague in 1998 on a Fulbright scholarship to learn how to cast large-scale works in one of the most famous glass studios in the world. The glass dress series, of which the new acquisition is a part, took about ten years to complete.

This is the fifth in a series of personal observations about how people experience and explore museums. Take a look at Howard's other blog posts on the subject.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, pianist and music educator Leslie Amper presented a program at American Art on the WPA Federal Music Project, providing a perfect antidote to the gloomy weather outside. With the exhibition 1934: A New Deal for Artists, currently on view through January 3, 2010, Amper's program added another layer to our understanding of the importance of FDR's initiatives to help artists, as well as composers, musicians, and dancers among others, in need.

Abe Pollin changed the face of downtown D.C. when he opened the MCI (now Verizon) Center over a decade ago in Gallery Place, across the street from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. To coincide with the opening of the MCI Center on December 2, 1997, and to welcome our new neighbors, American Art curated the exhibition Time Out! Sports in Art.

Season's Greetings, an exhibition from the Archives of American Art, features holiday cards made by artists, many of whose works are in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but doesn't the frame have an equally interesting story to tell? Martin Kotler, frames conservator at American Art, led an enthusiastic group through Frames 101 the other day in the Renwick Gallery's Grand Salon.

Forty years ago, German-born American artist Werner Drewes created this colorful woodcut in honor of what may be the most typically American holiday. I like it for its vivid lines, burst of energy, and full-blown spectrum, especially the use of the color purple.

When I heard that artist Jeanne-Claude had died, I went back to the blog post I wrote last year about her visit to American Art with her other half, Christo. Together, as husband and wife and as artists, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been reinventing the contemporary art landscape for more than fifty years with their installations such as wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf in Paris, and of course, Running Fence, their monumental project in Northern California from the 1970s.

Roy DeCarava, an American master, died October 27, 2009, a few weeks shy of his ninetieth birthday. Born in Harlem in 1919, and coming to adulthood during the Harlem Renaissance, DeCarava became a photographer of the street and the people who inhabited that day-to-day world.

"My ten millionth grandfather was Jonathan Edwards," critic Dave Hickey told us last week as part of the Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture Series at American Art. He added, "But I'm not going to give you any of that." What he did give us, instead, was a thought-provoking hour on the nature of contemporary art in America and how ideals of art and the artist in society were shaped centuries ago.

"What kind of highway signs did they have in Minnesota in 1934?" was just one of the questions Ann Prentice Wagner, guest curator of the exhibition 1934: A New Deal for Artists, needed to answer to place the paintings in context. "I was asking and answering questions of the kind that I hadn't had previously," Wagner told an enthusiastic audience who attended her lecture the other night at American Art.

For the ghostly and ghoulish among you, I found Helen Hyde's Goblin Lanterns of 1906. The artist, born in New York in 1868, moved with her family to San Francisco two years later, where her father prospered in a business associated with the gold rush.

“So we’ll see what happens when it gets dark,” William T. Wiley said after introductory remarks at the McEvoy Auditorium the other night to inaugurate the 2009 Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art at the museum, and the lights were dimmed.

To make her point that "museums are a place of theater," Kate Bonansinga, curator of Staged Stories: Renwick Craft Invitational 2009, began her introductory comments for the Artists' Roundtable on September 25th with an image of Charles Willson Peale's famous self-portrait where he lifts a thick red curtain to reveal his natural history museum. "It's all theater," Bonansinga added, "and that's the point that I'm interested in making."

Fully one-quarter of the painters depicted in the exhibition 1934: A New Deal for Artists were first-generation Americans: born elsewhere, but came to the United States in search of the American dream.

"How does a guy who doesn't like to be in public end up on stage in a full-body acrylic costume knitting things?" asks fiber artist Mark Newport, one of the four artists in Staged Stories, this year's Renwick Craft Invitational.

During the dog days of August, you're in the middle of DC and want to check your email. Best thing you could do would be to head straight to American Art where you've got two options for free WiFi.

This is the fourth in a series of personal observations about how people experience and explore museums.