SAAM Staff

A closer look at Black and Latinx art spaces and activism in L.A.

This past weekend, SAAM celebrated all that is good about video games when it hosted its annual SAAM Arcade. Almost 20,000 attended the two-day event held in the museum's Kogod Courtyard and throughout the museum. This is the third year SAAM has held this event as part of an ongoing initiative to showcase video games as an important part of our visual culture as well as study at the museum.

SAAM's current photography exhibition Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography, explores the post-World War II changes taking place in cities across the country through the eyes of ten photographers who documented these transformations.

To celebrate Nam June Paik's birthday today, we're reposting former associate curator of film and media art, Michael Mansfield's post about our 2012 exhibition Nam June Paik: Global Visionary. Tonight, to share in the festivities, Barbara London, Yale University's media arts critic and MoMA's former associate curator in the department of media and performance art, will give a talk, "What's Technology Got to Do With It?" The talk starts at 5:30 p.m. in SAAM's MacMillan Education Center and is free.

Over the course of half a century, Noguchi and Graham closely collaborated on numerous set designs for her groundbreaking modern dances. They held each other in the highest regard—Noguchi once said, "I felt that I was an extension of Martha and that she was an extension of me," while Graham described sharing "an unspoken language" with the sculptor.

To celebrate Black History Month, SAAM has just launched an online exhibition of Edmonia Lewis' sculpture on Google Arts & Culture. And to promote the exhibition, Google has made Lewis and her sculpture, The Death of Cleopatra, its Google Doodle for today!

Stephanie Stebich, executive director of the Tacoma Art Museum in Tacoma, Wash., since 2005, has been named The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, effective April 3.

Abraham Thomas recently joined the museum's staff as The Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator-in-Charge at the Renwick Gallery. Thomas writes about the intersection of American craft, the Renwick, and his interests.

SAAM mourns the loss of artist and friend, William Christenberry, who died this past Monday at 80. As a young man, Christenberry often traveled the back roads of the South with his father. He studied painting as a graduate student at the University of Alabama until he discovered James Agee‘s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Happy Thanksgiving from SAAM! To celebrate this year's holiday we wanted to share a woodcut by Harry Cimino.

To celebrate his philosophy and boldly declare that our new exhibition of his signature stripe paintings is now open, we have striped the museum's entrances.

Joe Lucchesi, the consulting curator for SAAM's exhibition, The Art of Romaine Brooks, is Associate Professor of Art History and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program Coordinator at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Joe gives us a look at the humor and wit of Romaine Brooks. He will be leading a tour of the show on Thursday, September 29 at 6 p.m. The Art of Romaine Brooks is on view until October 2, 2016.

Romaine Brooks was something of an interior decorator as well as an artist. She took a lively interest in the frame designs and finishes for her artworks. Several of the paintings in the exhibition The Art of Romaine Brooks are in frames that she personally designed or that were prepared under her direction.

It's Throwback Thursday! And we at Eye Level have decided it's a great opportunity to bring back some of our interesting posts from the past. After the incredibly successful run of the Renwick Gallery's WONDER exhibition, we wanted to highlight some of our works from SAAM's permanent collection.

On Saturday, July 9, SAAM presented America Now: America Particpates, an opportunity to incorporate creativity with citizen democracy through art, music, storytelling, and service.

The American artist Thornton Dial died on January 25, 2016, at the age of 87. Leslie Umberger, SAAM's curator of folk and self-taught art writes an appreciation about Mr. Dial and his work.

It's Throwback Thursday! And we at Eye Level have decided it's a great opportunity to bring back some of our interesting posts from the past. This Monday we will celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Curator E. Carmen Ramos discusses the legacy of Martin Luther King on contemporary Latino artists in our traveling exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art.

SAAM has just announced it is acquiring David Smith’s Agricola IV, a ground-breaking sculpture by one of the country’s most important artists. Agricola IV is a major addition to the museum’s presentation of American art in the twentieth century.

Desi Peters recently completed her graduate internship at the Lunder Conservation Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum, in paintings conservation. She describes her conservation treatment of Chapel In-the Fall-Wood by Maceptaw Bogun.

On October 16th-17th, over two hundred international participants gathered at the Smithsonian American Art Museum for the symposium "Shifting Terrain: Mapping a Transnational American Art History," to reflect upon the increasing globalization of American art history during the past decade and how this affects research on art practice here.