SAAM Stories

"How does a guy who doesn't like to be in public end up on stage in a full-body acrylic costume knitting things?" asks fiber artist Mark Newport, one of the four artists in Staged Stories, this year's Renwick Craft Invitational.

The Renwick Gallery has been the American Art Museum's showcase for contemporary crafts and decorative arts since 1972, but this National Historic Landmark has its own intriguing history.

Educators from across the country came to the museum for the week-long Clarice Smith National Teacher Institute to learn how to integrate art across the curriculum. I had the pleasure of talking to fifteen of them about podcasting.

Staged Stories: Renwick Craft Invitational 2009 runs until January 3, 2010. Nicholas Bell, curator at the Renwick Gallery, introduces us to the art and artists now on exhibition.

During the dog days of August, you're in the middle of DC and want to check your email. Best thing you could do would be to head straight to American Art where you've got two options for free WiFi.

Right now in the Luce Foundation Center you can borrow a Flip Mino and shoot a video of your museum visit.

Jean Shin’s exhibition Common Threads just closed at American Art. Once a show is over, American Art’s Registrar’s Office is tasked with de-installing it.

This is the fourth in a series of personal observations about how people experience and explore museums.

Art historian and Travel Channel host Lee Sandstead welcomes each visitor at the door of the McEvoy Auditorium wearing what he called hippie pants ("genuine polyester, not the fake stuff we have today") with the effervescent greeting, "I'll be your speaker tonight." Fasten your polyester pants; it's going to be an interesting evening.

The son of a Russian immigrant, abstract painter Morris Louis grew up in Baltimore. As an adult, Louis lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, and in Washington, D.C., where, in a small bungalow on Legation Street, NW, he turned his dining room into a studio. Some of his pictures were larger than the room itself, and he had to work on folded canvas.

Joann Moser, Senior Curator, wrote the following blog post about one of our recent acquisitions to American Art's collection.

If you're walking through a city, say New York or Washington D.C., you may want to have Jean Shin by your side. You may know your way around familiar streets, but through Shin's eyes you'll be able to look at the overlooked and see how the ordinary can rise to the level of art.

Robert Motherwell, known as an intellectual painter, has sometimes been called the spokesperson for the abstract expressionist movement. He painted in a style that often involved spontaneously generated images on large fields of canvas.

It was August last year when visitors on my tour started to pause a bit longer in front of cases 34b to 38a. All of a sudden the public’s interest was piqued by these paintings of industry, a hard day’s work, and the American heartland.

In Lily Furedi's homage to the New York subway, part of the current exhibition 1934: A New Deal for Artists, I'm captivated mostly by the woman applying lipstick on the far left—so much that I want to create a narrative for her.

To celebrate Women’s History Month, a selection of women artist portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, part of the photograph archives at the American Art Museum, was added to Flickr in March.

The May 25th edition of the New Yorker features a poem by Philip Levine, an American poet who can count among his numerous awards the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1928, and he often portrays that city in his poetry: the grit as well as the grace. He digs deep into the lives of ordinary people, if there is such a thing.

Abraham Walkowitz's iconic sketches of dancer Isadora Duncan capture her spirit, passion, and zest. They also reveal her sturdy physique, which is the opposite of the balletic ideal.