SAAM Stories

Eye Level, with the help of former intern Becky Harlan, had a chance to speak with photographer Muriel Hasbun about her artistic roots and her current process. Her work appears in the current exhibition, A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum as well as Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art.

Debrah Dunner, curatorial assistant at our Renwick Gallery, interviewed basket collectors Martha Ware and Steve Cole about A Measure of the Earth: The Cole-Ware Collection of American Baskets at the Renwick Gallery. The show is up for six more days, through December 8, 2013.

Remember when LOVE was all the rage, as opposed to social media's lukewarm, one-size-fits-all, "Like"? Robert Indiana's iconic Pop image from 1970 seemed to sum up the era in its message as well as its delivery: bright colors and strong graphics.

Last weekend, the Smithsonian American Art Museum opened up its doors and its data to a group of enthusiastic hackers. We were looking for help re-imagining the digital interpretation in the museum's visible storage facility, the Luce Foundation Center for American Art.

Time magazine art critic Richard Lacayo spoke the other evening on the work and lives of aging artists as the second speaker in this year's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art.

Kathleen Joyce, intern in American Art's Research and Scholars Center, recaps our symposium American Art in Dialogue with Africa and its Diaspora made possible by the Terra Foundation for American Art. The symposium took place on October 4-5, 2013. If you missed it, view the webcast of the entire event.

Katie Crooks coordinates the quarterly craft program Handi-hour at the American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery. The Renwick Gallery will close for renovation in December, so we thought now was a good time to catch up with Katie about the popular program and find out what will happen to it while the Renwick is closed.

Next up in our Luce Local Artist Talk series, presented with CulturalDC, is choreographer and dancer Sarah Ewing. Ewing, who hails from Australia, is currently a Resident Artist at D.C.'s CityDance and performs regularly across Washington. She stopped by the Luce Foundation Center over the summer to answer a few questions from this dance enthusiast (who sadly has two left feet).

Michelle Sullivan is a second-year graduate fellow in Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation and spent this summer at the Lunder Conservation Center. She recently treated this untitled work by Jorge Soto Sánchez for the exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, which will open on October 25, 2013.

In a video podcast, curator E. Carmen Ramos explains that the mid-twentieth century was an important period in Latino art. At this time, Latino artists were attending art schools in this country and were beginning to contest their marginalized position within American society.

Debrah Dunner, curatorial assistant at our Renwick Gallery, interviewed Nicholas Bell, The Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator of American Craft and Decorative Art, about A Measure of the Earth: The Cole-Ware Collection of American Baskets at the Renwick Gallery through December 8, 2013.

Teresita Fernández's Nocturnal (Horizon Line), installed in the third floor galleries of American Art, strikes the viewer for both its beauty and its weight, as this piece is made of mined graphite. But in the artist's hands, the dense mineral becomes a canvas, and her work blooms into an homage to the beauty and mystery of evening, much the same as James McNeill Whistler's tonalist works and ethereal Nocturnes of the late 19th century, examined the beauty and poetry of twilight and the hours that followed.

October is Archives Month and this year blogs across the Smithsonian will highlight "true stories" about their collections and give an inside look at the Institution's archival collections and practices.

One of the coolest things to recently come out of the museum's Luce Foundation Center is our ongoing music collaboration with the Washington City Paper. Managing editor, Jonathan L. Fischer helps us select area bands for our Luce Unplugged Community Showcase and the end result is a magical combination of art, local music, brews, and a great group of people. This time we decided to focus our attention on two bands: Janel and Anthony, and Teen Mom.

Dawn Planas, a graduate conservation student at Buffalo State College, and an intern in the Lunder Conservation Center's objects lab, recently assisted with a treatment of Pepón Osorio's El Chandelier. Planas gives us some insight into how she prepared the chandelier for the exhibition.

Artists often visit the American Art Museum to give a lecture, meet with staff, or to attend the opening of an exhibition.

Drummer and Composer Nasar Abadey is the founder, leader and driving force of SUPERNOVA®. He will be performing "Jazz and the Civil Rights Movement" at the next Take 5! on Thursday, September 19th from 5-7 p.m. Public Programs Coordinator, Laurel Fehrenbach, interviewed Abadey to find out more about the theme of the concert and just how music impacted an important moment in history.

Artist and educator Muriel Hasbun is a member of the largest Latino community in the greater D.C. region. Hasbun grew up in El Salvador and settled here as a student in the 1980s. She is now department chair and associate professor of photography at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. Hasbun's personal history and artistic development speaks to a larger Salvadoran experience of migration and endurance in the midst of adversity.