SAAM Stories

In the words of How I Met your Mother's Barney Stinson, our next Luce Unplugged is going to be, "legen . . . wait for it . . . dary." Legendary. Pop culture references aside, this Friday's Luce Unplugged Community Showcase features great local musicians, Alex Minoff, The Caribbean, and Kokayi, as well as a free beer tasting by local brewery DC Brau (get here early, the tasting is from 6 to 7 p.m.). We have also partnered with the Washington City Paper, which has been an invaluable music resource for us as well as the community at large.

Our next Handi-hour event is coming up this week, with the usual live music, craft beers, and almost-unlimited crafting options. This month we have a special guest with artist Daniel Michalik, one of the artists from 40 under 40: Craft Futures who will be sharing his love of recycled cork and helping with the featured cork-related crafts.

Florencia Bazzano-Nelson recently joined the Smithsonian American Art Museum. A scholar of Latin American and Latino art, Bazzano-Nelson is assisting in the preparation of the upcoming exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, opening October 25, 2013. In this blog post Bazzano-Nelson considers the paintings of Rafael Soriano, who like other Cuban American artists, actively explored the theme of exile.

This post is part of an ongoing series on Eye Level: "Q and Art," where American Art's Research department brings you interesting questions and answers about art and artists from our archive.

Amelia Cornfield was an intern in the Media and Technology Office this summer, where she worked on a variety of web and social media projects. She loves the Luce Foundation Center, and selected this painting from the folk art collection on display in the Center to write about for the blog.

These warm August afternoons often make me step inside of American Art not just to cool off, but to have an ah-ha moment with something that strikes me inside the museum: person or painting. Maybe it was the heat but the image that grabbed me today, Bar and Grill by Jacob Lawrence, was about quenching one's thirst while struggling with a deeper need: freedom.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, artists from around the world began making art by reworking existing films and using other moving image technologies like video. One pioneer of this new art form is Raphael Montañez-Ortiz. Born in 1934 in Brooklyn, New York, Montañez-Ortiz attended Pratt Institute in the 1960s. During this time he also studied Native American cultures, in part motivated by a desire to explore his own indigenous heritage.

The American Art Museum building used to be the U.S. Patent Office Building. During the Civil War, it also served as a barracks, a hospital, and the location of President Lincoln's second Inaugural Ball.

In This Case is a series of ongoing posts on art in the Luce Foundation Center, a visible art storage facility at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that houses about 3,000 pieces in sixty-four secure glass cases. Not every work of art has a secret but if it wasn’t for a tip from one of our conservators, I wouldn’t have known about the treasures hidden on the back of this folk art Guitar by an unidentified artist

Did you know that sandpaper technology has improved over the past 40 years? Neither did I until I spoke with objects conservator Hugh Shockey about Frederick Eversley's Untitled, a sculpture he was treating in his lab.

We recently opened 40 under 40: Craft Futures at the museum's Renwick Gallery.

I have a confession. I like vending machines a little too much. The convenience, the multitude of options, the opportunity to empty out my change purse—what's not to love?

Long before there was YouTube and social media, there was Nam June Paik who said, "Someday everybody will have his own TV channel."

Crazy, fun things happen when artists come to town. Olek, pictured here and one of 40 artists whose work is in the Renwick Gallery's 40 under 40: Craft Futures exhibition, wrapped the Albert Einstein Memorial in yarn yesterday.

Have you ever looked at a work of art and wished you could ask the artist how they made it? For our conservators, speaking to artists about their works is an important part of their jobs. Conservators want to know exactly what an artwork is made of and how it was constructed before cleaning or treating it.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't stoked about this week's opening of 40 under 40: Craft Futures at the museum's Renwick Gallery. Our curator Nicholas Bell and assistant Debrah Dunner have been working diligently for more than two years to put this baby together, and we're all excited to see the work complete in the galleries.

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?"

I've always wondered why one of the figures in this sculpture, The Wounded Scout, a Friend in the Swamp, by John Rogers has a missing hand. It almost appears to be intentional, given the nature of the artwork's theme. But after attending a joint presentation by Helen Ingalls, objects conservator, and Ann Wagner, art historian, I found out that the sculpture suffered this loss of limb before it was acquired by the museum.