Howard Kaplan

Artists have been capturing all the different moods of light for millennia. American artists such as members of the Hudson River School, or the American impressionists, managed to capture light as a way of defining the landscape.

Bring the entire family to the museum's Kogod Courtyard on Saturday, January 24 from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. as we celebrate The Year of the Ox in style!

Greetings from D.C. where change comes every four—or sometimes eight—years. It's an interesting time to be in the nation's capital. On January 20th, our newest president will be sworn in; his election was a momentous achievement in so many ways.

What’s better than an evening at a museum while the world around you is settling down for the night: it’s magic.

I think of Ansel Adams as the Walt Whitman of American photography, creating "silent songs" about monumental landscapes. Georgia O'Keeffe, on the other hand, reminds me of Emily Dickinson.

"I didn't choose painting," Grace Hartigan once told an interviewer, "It chose me. I didn't have any talent. I just had genius."

We've just turned the last page on this year's calendar and it's time to count down the days remaining in 2008. To take a good look at the last month of the year, I've chosen December from Harry Cimino's Marchbanks Calendar.

Who'd have thought that spending an hour and a half with a lawyer could be so entertaining? Local attorney Joshua Kaufman of Venable LLP enlighted the audience at American Art the other night on the legal issues of acquiring, owning, inheriting, and selling art, from the big picture to the fine print.

December 1 is World AIDS Day as well as what was once known as A Day Without Art. That began December 1, 1989, in response to the AIDS crisis and in honor of all the artists who lost their lives or were affected by the disease.

George Elbert Burr created this menu for a Thanksgiving dinner in 1905 that included consomme, English plum pudding, charlotte russe (a dessert of cream and ladyfingers), and of course, the turkey, illustrated here in a simple pen and ink and watercolor drawing.

O'Keeffe's Manhattan was created for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. If the flowers don’t seem like typical O’Keeffe, they’re not: she based them on paper and cloth decorative flowers created by Hispanic women in New Mexico.

The grand Renwick Gallery, which is part of SAAM, was built in the mid nineteenth century to house the art collection of Washington banker and philanthropist William Wilson Corcoran. From the beginning the Renwick was an important building, and Corcoran was a superstar mover and shaker in D.C.

A Brush with Georgia O'Keeffe is a play about the artist who is being celebrated—along with photographer Ansel Adams—in SAAM's current exhibition, Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities. Actress and playwright Natalie Mosco stars in the play she wrote about O'Keeffe and the important people in her life, most notably her husband, photographer and general mover and shaker, Alfred Stieglitz.

Lewis Nerman is a passionate collector of contemporary art. In 2007, he and his family opened the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas.

When Lino Tagliapietra's wife had admired a Valentino couture gown some years back, he told her to forget about the dress: he'd make her something even better.

In honor of our recent exhibition Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, the Lunder Conservation Center presented a behind-the-scenes look at the artist's Fisk murals.

As we celebrate National Cake Decorating Day on Friday, October 10 (people, check your calendars!), I can think of no greater tribute to the sugary art of confection than pausing to look at one of Wayne Thiebaud's own creations.

The market's up! The market's down! While the financial markets try to regain their footing, I decided to see how artists have portrayed Wall Street over the years, and came across this interesting lithograph by Arnold Ronnebeck.

Eric Widing, head of the American Paintings and Sculpture Department for Christie's since 1998, kicked off the 2008 Collector's Roundtable series with his talk, "Buying at Auction," offering us a capsule of his years in the art business.

Mark Dion has been chosen as the 2008 winner of the Lucelia Artist Award, given annually by the Smithsonian American Art Museum to an artist younger than 50 who has shown outstanding creativity through an exceptional body of work.