Howard Kaplan

The Renwick Craft Invitational began eleven years ago, making the 2011 event, number five. If an exhibition can have a theme song, this year's Invitational, History in the Making would be, "Everything Old is New Again."

George Ault didn't very much like the world-at-large, so he left New York City in 1937, and moved about 100 miles north to the village of Woodstock, New York with Louise Jonas, whom he would marry four years later.

John Maccabee, founder of CityMystery, helped to create Ghosts of a Chance, American Art's first alternate reality game which was a first for museums everywhere. He and his team recently helped us launch Pheon, which has an online component as well. We caught up with the San Francisco-based Maccabee when he stopped by the museum last week.

In conjunction with the exhibition Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow, the American Art Museum presents the Art and Science lecture series that places the science of climate change within a cultural context. Alexis Rockman kicked off the series.

Jasper Johns, one of our favorite artists renowned for his paintings and printmaking, received the Medal of Freedom Tuesday night from President Obama.

John Hanhardt, the senior curator of media art at the American Art Museum, has put together the current exhibition, Watch This! New Directions in the Art of the Moving Image in American Art's new media art gallery. It features the work of Nam June Paik, the founding father of video art, as well as Cory Arcangel, Bill Viola, Jim Campbell, Peter Campus, Svetlana and Igor Kopystiansky, Marina Zurkow, and Kota Ezawa, whose work, LYAM 3D, is best viewed with those funky blue and red 3D glasses provided in the gallery.

On Sunday, The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942-1946 ends its nearly year long run at the Renwick Gallery. I'm sure I'm not alone in naming this one of my favorite recent exhibitions, and will be sad to see it go. In honor of the exhibition and its closing, Eye Level spoke with the exhibition's curator, Delphine Hirasuna, who is also a writer and a blogger, from her home in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Alexis Rockman kicked off the first in the series of "Art and Science" talks at American Art's McEvoy Auditorium in conjunction with the exhibition of his work: Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow.

In advance of Alexis Rockman's lecture at American Art on Wednesday night at 7pm, we spoke to him from his Tribeca studio about the talk, monster films, inspiration, and his current exhibition at the museum, Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow.

This is the seventh 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.

As we prepare to say farewell to the exhibition, Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, we take a look at some of the people who helped Rockwell tell his story—the people who posed for him.

Pierre Huyghe is the 2010 winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Contemporary Artist Award. He is the ninth recipient of the award given to an artist under the age of fifty (he’s forty-eight, so just in time) that is meant to encourage the artist’s future development and experimentation.

With the exhibition Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg closing on January 2nd, we wanted to share some of the comments visitors have shared with us, both online as well as in notebooks in the gallery at American Art.

To coincide with A Revolution in Wood: The Bresler Collection, the current exhibition at the Renwick Gallery, members from local woodturning associations (the Capital Area Woodturners, Chesapeake Woodturners, and Montgomery County Woodturners) demonstrate the process used by the artists in the exhibition to make their one-of-a-kind pieces.

American Art's latest exhibition is Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow. Eye Level sat down with the show's curator, Joanna Marsh, to talk about the artist and his artworks.

Installation artist Sarah Sze gave an enthusiastic talk the other evening at the McEvoy Auditorium at American Art, as the third and final speaker of this year's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture Series in American Art.

It's Wayne Thiebaud's 90th birthday.

Boston Globe photography and arts critic, Mark Feeney, presented his lecture "Four Photographers on Three Wheels: William Eggleston's Tricycle and Before" at American Art's McEvoy Auditorium the other night, as the second speaker of this year's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art.

"Welcome, all you fans of small bodies of water," John Gossage said, as he took to the stage of the McEvoy Auditorium for a spirited discussion of his work The Pond with Toby Jurovics, American Art's curator of photography.

Erica Hirshler, senior curator of American paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, kicked off the Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture Series in American Art with a spirited look at John Singer Sargent. His painting, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit—a seven by seven foot masterpiece that has earned pride of place in the MFA as well as in Hirshler's heart—was the jumping off point for a look at Sargent's portraits that ranged from the seemingly innocent (as in the case of the Boit's) to the scandalous Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau).