Howard Kaplan

About two dozen art enthusiasts gathered at American Art's Lincoln Gallery on Tuesday evening to take part in a conversation titled, "Is This Art?"

In a poem titled, "Mother to Son," Langston Hughes wrote of an African American woman's hardships, as she advises her son to never give up: "Well, son, I'll tell you:/Life for me ain't been no crystal stair..." Far from it. These steps have tacks, splinters and torn up boards. Sometimes the stairs are bare. It is these steps I was reminded of when I visited American Art's new exhibition, African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights, and Beyond, on view through September 3, 2012.

Watch This! New Directions in the Art of the Moving Image, the dynamic exhibition of time-based media has been reinstalled, with new examples of video art that span the last fifty years. It has its own dedicated gallery on the third floor of the museum and is a welcoming space filled with works that fascinate, stimulate, and resonate.

Behind every good sunrise lurks an inevitable sunset. This Sunday, May 6, Something of Splendor: Decorative Arts from the White House closes at American Art's Renwick Gallery after a near seven-month run.

Somewhere between the letters PhD and CSI lives the amazing work of painting conservators. Part researcher and part detective, they study paintings with state-of-the-art tools that help them see through layers of paint and varnish and enable them to conserve works of art whose colors may have gradually shifted over time and whose canvases may show signs of age.

When you hear the name Felrath Hines, you may at first say "Who?" but after viewing some of his work, including the recently acquired Abstract Landscape and Radiant, you may ask why you hadn't heard of him before.

On Tuesday, January 24, a couple of hours before the President delivered his address to Congress, Annie Leibovitz presented her own state of the union to a sold-out audience at American Art's McEvoy Auditorium.

Pilgrimage is a personal journey by photographer Annie Leibovitz, celebrated over the decades for her astute portraits of the cultural landscape.

Helen Frankenthalter, the last of the Abstract Expressionists, died on December 27, 2011, at the age of eighty-three. In 1951, when she was only twenty-three, she began to soak, or stain, her canvasses with extremely thin paint.

The current exhibition, The Great American Hall of Wonders celebrates the 19th-century American spirit of ingenuity through the examination of art, science, and invention. It was a great time to be a scientist, unless, of course, you were a woman (with the field of astronomy being the exception, thanks in part to astronomer Maria Mitchell and the comet she discovered in 1847), a newly arrived immigrant, or a person of color recently granted freedom.

Multiplicity features contemporary prints from the museum's permanent collection. All of the prints are editions and each impression is considered a work of art. Also of interest is the fact that the works on view represent a collaboration between artist and printer.

The American Art Museum is no stranger to invention. The building that houses the museum was formerly the United States Patent Office (President Andrew Jackson authorized the construction of the building in 1836), with thousands of patent models on display on the third floor, including one designed by President Lincoln.

Ah, a walk through the museum on a chilly autumn afternoon. Lots of folks walking the corridors and looking at art. It's a good day. In American Art's Lincoln Gallery on the third floor of the museum, I spent some time getting acquainted with Homage to Still Life by Carlos Almaraz.

This porcelain platter was made for President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 by Haviland & Company, in Limoges, France.

Judging by the conversation between Internet gurus Steve Crocker and Vinton Cerf, the world as we know it began about fifty years ago. That's when men like Crocker and Cerf began to figure out ways to break communication out of the box and into a brave, new world of global contact. In some ways, this IS your father's internet, or at least the story of how it all began. Cue the dial-up modem....

New York-based artist, Julie Mehretu, was the third and final speaker in this year's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art. Her work uses layers of architectural images--stadiums, airports, ruins both contemporary and ancient--and repurposes them with an eye toward reconceiving and reconceptualizing.

"I think my work is more capable of articulating my thoughts and feelings than I'm willing to say. I'm going to let the work speak for itself," Elizabeth Peyton said at the beginning of her talk in the Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture Series.

Featured in the new exhibition at American Art, Made in Chicago: The Koffler Collection, Don Baum's Chinatown is an assemblage made from wood, crushed metal cans, and rulers that have been cut, glued, and reassembled.

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the White House Historical Association, established by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in 1961 to restore the historical ambiance of the rooms and create a museum-worthy collection, the Renwick is featuring the exhibition, Something of Splendor: Decorative Arts from the White House.

George Gurney, the nation’s foremost expert on American sculpture, is retiring after more than 36 years at the American Art Museum. He will be greatly missed, as a curator and friend! But before leaving, he gave a farewell tour of the museum. Three and a half decades adds up to a lot of interesting stories.