Howard Kaplan

Five Georgia O'Keeffe paintings in the current exhibition, Cross Currents: Modern Art from the Sam Rose and Julie Walters Art Collection, create a mini exhibition in themselves.

Ten years ago, November 29, 2005 to be exact, SAAM launched Eye Level, the first museum blog at the Smithsonian. It's given us the ability to tell stories and show people the museum from the inside out.

After extensive renovations to the galleries and behind-the-scenes mechanicals, the Renwick Gallery of Art reopens to the public today with WONDER.

As the final speaker in this year's Clarice Smith Lecture Series, noted scholar Lawrence Weschler presented a talk on race relations in the United States, using Ed Kienholz's Five Car Stud as the mirror in which this difficult history is reflected and refracted.

hough billed as a renovation, I like to think of the reopening of the Renwick Gallery as a reimagining as well. The newly spiffed up Renwick is in mint condition, ready for the next fifty years, or more. In addition to the physical updates that include preserving numerous historical elements with new state-of-the-art infrastructure, the gallery reopens on November 13 with it's inaugural exhibition in our new space, Wonder.

One word that comes to mind when visiting the newly opened exhibition, Crosscurrents: Modern Art from the Sam Rose and Julie Walters Collection, is liberation. It's not just one generation breaking from the one before, it's a sense that the modern twentieth century opened a world never before imagined.

"Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty" is the first museum retrospective of Penn's work in more than twenty years. It opens Friday, October 23 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and runs until March 20, 2016.

Art critic of the Los Angeles Times since 1989, Christopher Knight, the second speaker in this year's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture series, illuminated the life, work—and hair pieces—of Andy Warhol.

Artist Trevor Paglen spoke last week in the Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture Series, and said his goal as an artist is to “help us see the historical moment we live in.” Paglen made a case that this is true for all art over time, no matter the time period, and showed examples from Turner to Rothko, leading up to present times.

Text Rain, the video work from 1999, by Romy Achituv and Camille Utterback is featured in the current exhibition, Watch This! Revelations in Media Art, which remains on view at SAAM through September 7.

The best place to watch afternoon thunderstorms in D.C.? Hands down, it's the third floor of American Art, a special corner in the current exhibition, Watch This! Revelations in Media Art. Cloud Music, created between 1974-1979 by artists Robert Watts, David Berhman, and Bob Diamond is a weather-driven audio/visual installation that reads the sky like it's a musical score.

The ghosts, the commuters, the visitors, the stories...they all pass across the screen in Jim Campbell's Grand Central Station #2, a poetic meditation on movement and memory. On view in the exhibition, Watch This: Revelations in Media Art, Campbell's LED-based work features shadows that move across the floor of New York's Grand Central Station.

Russell Connor was an abstract painter, happily minding his own business, when in Boston in 1969, he met media visionary, Nam June Paik. As Connor told us the other night at a program in honor of Paik's birthday.

This is the fourteenth in a series of personal observations about how people experience and explore museums. Take a look at Howard's other blog posts about seeing things. Today, celebrating Christo's 80th birthday and a look at his Running Fence.

On Monday, April 20, at 6pm in American Art's McEvoy Auditorium, artist Mark Bradford will be discussing his Amendment series in the third annual James Dicke Contemporary Artist Lecture.

Opening today, the exhibition, The Artistic Journey of Yasuo Kuniyoshi, looks at the evolution of the artist's work, and is the first comprehensive exhibition about the artist in the U.S. since 1948. It remains on view through August 30, 2015.

Billed on his website as "the Soul Superstar You've Never Heard Of," Mingering Mike is an enigma, wrapped in faux vinyl, and carefully packaged in cardboard. The artist, who wishes to remain anonymous but for his sobriquet, is a DC native, who, caught up in the sounds and images of his hometown in the 1960s and 1970s, dreamed of joining the ranks of singer-songwriter Marvin Gaye who was transforming the soundscape of the city and the nation.

At the museum, some of us have become a bit obsessed not only with the paintings of Richard Estes, but in locating his signature (or name, really) in each of his paintings. Estes usually signs his work, but often in ways that make it nearly impossible to discover.

Eye Level had a chance to catch up with Joanna Marsh, the James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art at American Art, for a conversation about our current exhibition, The Singing and the Silence: Birds in Contemporary Art, which is currently on view through February 22, 2015.

Kathleen A. Foster spoke the other evening at the McEvoy Auditorium, the third and final speaker in this year's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture in American Art series. Her focused talk concerned Winslow Homer's iconic painting from 1884, The Life Line.