SAAM Stories

With the opening of the much-anticipated exhibition Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence, Eye Level had a chance to speak with Christo about the making of the original outdoor installation, Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972-76.

Running Fence, the monumental temporary artwork by Christo and Jeanne-Claude existed for only two weeks in September of 1976. It was made of 240,000 square yards of heavy woven white nylon fabric, 90 miles of steel cable, 2,050 steel poles, 350,000 hooks, and 13,000 earth anchors. In 2008 American Art acquired the definitive record of this artwork and our exhibition, Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence opens this Friday.

American Art holds an important collection of works by William H. Johnson. To learn more about this celebrated artist, explore A Journey Through Art with William H. Johnson.

This year's Collectors Roundtable series was formed in part by feedback the museum received from the previous one. People wanted more Collecting 101 presentations, so this year's program was shaped with the budding collector in mind. Plus, this year the three lectures are also free, so that leaves more money to put aside for your art collection. Perhaps you'd like to start with a print?

Last week I joined guest curator Chris Melissinos at this year's Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco to present "A Day at the Museum: How the Smithsonian is Embracing Games."

This post is part of an ongoing series here 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: What do the paintings of Stuart Davis reveal about trends or themes in America?

"It all started because of this bird pin I'm wearing," Delphine Hirasuna told us the other day at the American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery in preparation for the March 5 opening of The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942–1946.

"I'm a comic book writer, artist, and storyteller," Darwyn Cooke told us when he spoke recently at the McEvoy Auditorium about his first graphic novel, The Hunter, an adaptation of the famous crime novel written by Donald E. Westlake under the pseudonym Richard Stark.

There hasn't been a major exhibition of the works by nineteenth-century photographer Timothy H. O'Sullivan in more than thirty years, but thanks to a collaboration between the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Library of Congress, all that changes this week in a big way with the opening of the exhibition Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the creation of internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. The order—a direct result of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor the previous December, which killed thousands of Americans—placed 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps.

We usually think of Presidents' Day as celebrating the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But we found this presidential gem of President and Mrs. Eisenhower, from 1955, two years after the former five-star general took office.

This Valentine's Day, love may be in the air, but it's also found its way into the museum. We've had canoodling sightings in the Kogod Courtyard, and even a highly romantic marriage proposal in one of the galleries (and the good news is that she said yes!).

Snow. Need I say more? The Smithsonian has been closed since Friday afternoon; schools are closed this entire week; and snow is piled a mile high (okay, not really, but my snow-shoveling back seems to think so). And there appears to be no vaccine in sight for an epidemic of cabin fever. Is this Washington or is this Buffalo?

This post is part of an ongoing series here 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: What was the artistic process for creating the statue of Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial?

For almost a week now I have been trying to write about the devastating earthquake in Haiti from the point of view of art and culture, but it didn't seem right—or, at least, not the right time. With so many lives lost or destroyed, and with people still missing, what could I possibly say about paintings and sculpture that would be up to the task?

To celebrate the life of Nam June Paik, John G. Hanhardt, Senior Curator for Media Arts, Nam June Paik Media Arts Center, has written a remembrance of the artist on the fourth anniversary of his death.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery recently acquired Karen LaMonte’s Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery. LaMonte, a glass artist, went to Prague in 1998 on a Fulbright scholarship to learn how to cast large-scale works in one of the most famous glass studios in the world. The glass dress series, of which the new acquisition is a part, took about ten years to complete.

This post is part of an ongoing series here on Eye Level: The Best of Ask Joan of Art. Question: I’m interested in artwork by William H. Johnson that depicts children as a representation of issues and images from Johnson’s larger African American community.