SAAM Stories

American Art's Mandy Young is receiving reports from our conservator, Hugh Shockey, who is in Haiti to help with the rehab of the country's artworks after the recent earthquake there.

I always wondered what it would be like to compose a score for particular artworks in the collection of American Art. Clearly a late- nineteenth-century painting by Thomas Wilmer Dewing would sound different from a meditative Mark Rothko work painted seventy years later.

American artist Louise Bourgeois died on Monday, May 31, at the age of ninety-eight. Born in France to parents who made their living repairing tapestries, she moved to New York City in 1938 and lived and worked there for the rest of her life.

For me, the name Louis Comfort Tiffany conjures up images of art glass, opulence, and the mystique of the Gilded Age. But I had no idea that he was also a photographer and gained some amount of renown for his images. I love this one, an albumen print entitled Fishermen Unloading a Boat, Sea Bright, New Jersey, taken in 1887.

This post is part of an ongoing series on Eye Level: The Best of Ask Joan of Art. Question: At the museum's Renwick Gallery, I saw a grandfather clock covered in a white cloth, but I can't remember the artist or title of this work.

Wes Yamaka recently wrote a comment about his father-in-law on our The Art of Gaman exhibition comment page. We'd like to post it on Eye Level as a testament to the personal stories that have been passed down from internees in the camps.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has the largest collection of works by African American Henry O. Tanner in the United States. Several paintings are in the Lunder Conservation Center undergoing technical analysis in preparation for the 2012 exhibition Henry O. Tanner: An International Retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

This year's Collectors' Roundtable Series concluded the other evening with a spirited presentation by Richard Kelly, who showed us the ins and outs (as well as the oohs and ahhhs) of building a collection of illustrations.

Our closer look at the exhibition, The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese Internment Camps, 1942-1946, continues with The Vest with a Thousand Knots.

This Howard Finster painting was the most talked about artwork at American Art's recent Slow Art event.

"That is not me," Jules Feiffer said, referring to the Bob Landry black-and-white photograph of an elegantly dressed Fred Astaire performing "Puttin' on the Ritz" from the 1946 movie Blue Skies. Feiffer spoke recently on Landry's photograph in the museum's McEvoy auditorium as part of the American Pictures lecture series, which pairs works of art with leading figures of contemporary American culture.

Filmmakers Albert Maysles and his brother, David (who died in 1987), are recognized as masters of "direct cinema," the American cousin of French "cinéma vérité." They first met Christo and Jeanne-Claude in the early 1960s and filmed many of their works over the decades, including two that will be screened at American Art's McEvoy Auditorium on April 29, at 6:30 pm: Valley Curtain (1973) and Christo in Paris (1986).

Nina Simon is well known to museum folks as the author of the blog Museum 2.0. She consults with museums around the world to design exhibitions, programs, and online experiences that engage visitors as co-creators and community members, not just consumers.

On April 20, in the Luce Foundation Center's weekly Draw & Discover sketching workshop, we will look at preparatory drawings, models, and photographs in the exhibition Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence, which opened recently at the American Art Museum.

In the second of three Collectors' Roundtable lectures this spring, Elmerina and Dr. Paul Parkman and John T. Kotelly led a spirited conversation on collecting contemporary craft. All three share a passion for studio arts and related stories of how they began collecting, what they've acquired since, and how once the collecting bug strikes, your life may never be the same.

Six months ago American Art, along with twelve other museums around the world, invited people to spend an afternoon taking a long look at art as part of Slow Art day. It was the antithesis of the fast-paced social networking world personified by Twitter and Facebook.

Laurel Fehrenbach, public programs assistant here at American Art, manages the free Take 5! jazz concerts, which take place in the Kogod Courtyard every third Thursday from 5–8 p.m. She talked with Sandy Asirvatham, who will be performing vocals and keyboard with Frank Russo (drums), Max Murray (bass) and Jeff Antoniuk (sax) at Take 5! The program, A Tribute to the Tax Man with Sandy Asirvatham, will take place on tax day, Thursday, April 15, in the museum’s Kogod Courtyard from 5–8 p.m.

This post is part of an ongoing series on Eye Level: The Best of Ask Joan of Art. Begun in 1993, Ask Joan of Art is the longest-running arts-based electronic reference service in the country. Question: Can you tell me more about Eleanor Roosevelt's connection to Augustus Saint-Gaudens's Adams Memorial?