SAAM Stories

After hanging for more than five years in the Renwick's Grand Salon, the 300 or so George Catlins (as well as the Thomas Morans) have come down to make room for a new installation from the museum's permanent collection.

Dr. Walter O. Evans, named one of 'America's Top 100 Collectors' by Art & Antiques magazine in 2006, spoke the other night as part of the Collectors' Roundtable series on "Collecting outside the Canon."

There was something about Sam Maloof that makes him stick with you. It wasn't just that he was kind and generous; there was an energy about him that was truly inspiring.

With the release of Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, moviegoers will get a look at some of the most popular objects in the Smithsonian's collections—such as Amelia Earhart's airplane, Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, and even Oscar the Grouch from the television program Sesame Street. Intrigued by the idea of visiting museums at night and interacting with animated collections? Then check out the Smithsonian American Art Museum's online children's game, Meet Me at Midnight.

Renowned New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast was the fourth and final speaker in this year's American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series and often had the crowded auditorium in stitches.

The other night, my friend Nancy was heading over to American Art to see the Jean Shin exhibition that had just opened. Last year she had answered Shin's call for trophies from local residents. (I heard Shin got more than 2000.) That evening, Nancy was going to a reception for those who contributed. I had been drafting some notes for a post about Shin, so when Nancy asked if I wanted to go, I said, "Yes, I'm coming with you."

Staff at the museum have been working all week to carefully orchestrate moving a suite of monumental landscape paintings by Thomas Moran out of the Grand Salon at the museum's Renwick Gallery to our main building in the Penn Quarter neighborhood.

In the early years of the twentieth century, brothers Charles and Henry Greene created some of the most original and important architecture in the country. After the second world war, they were nearly forgotten. But why? For starters, out of approximately 140 houses designed by the brothers, sixty-six have been demolished, while another fourteen were substantially altered. About sixty homes were left standing (literally) to represent their body of work.

On a recent Saturday afternoon writer Jamaica Kincaid offered ninety minutes of personal remembrances in one of the most interesting and heartfelt presentations in the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture series. Although she started, hesitated, then began again, you couldn't help but be on her side. "I'm thinking of this as a dress rehearsal," she said, after trying to get her powerpoint to behave, "because if this works, I'm taking it on the road."

Laura had the great fortune to talk about Paik and the Archive with one of the world’s leading experts on Paik, John G. Hanhardt, who is the Museum’s consulting senior curator of film and media art.

Last week, we began to install works by the artist Jean Shin for an exhibition titled Jean Shin: Common Threads that opens on May 1st. The artworks being assembled promise to be compelling.

I recently discovered a side of Abraham Lincoln I didn't know too much about: our sixteenth president was a nineteenth-century technophile. Not only is he the only president to this day to have a patented invention (come'on President Obama, your turn), he used then-new technology to help win the Civil War.

The Hallmark Photo Collection (yes, that Hallmark) began in the early 1960s, and was even displayed in a gallery on the ground level of their flagship store in Manhattan. Keith F. Davis joined the Hallmark Fine Art Collection in 1979, when its holdings included about 2500 photos. By 2006, when Hallmark donated the collection to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City (where Davis was named curator of photography), the collection boasted 6500 photos by 900 different photographers.

You arrive in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Luce Foundation Center and are presented with a problem; the museum is haunted and we need YOUR help to banish the mischievous spirits. To do this, you need to complete three quests as part of our large-scale multimedia scavenger hunt, Ghosts of a Chance.

ArtBabble, the online art video service from the Indianapolis Museum of Art that launched today, has raised the bar even higher, and gives the museum incredible new tools for presenting contemporary artists’ ever-growing repertoire of stylistic and narrative innovations online.

This morning I found Alex Katz in a very unusual place: my J. Crew catalogue, which faithfully arrived with its usual thud in today's mail.

"You make me feel so respectable," writer and filmmaker John Waters wryly remarked after a rousing welcome to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, then added, "We'll see what we can do about it." Baltimore-native Waters, best known for his films Hairspray and Pink Flamingos, spoke, if not performed, at the McEvoy Auditorium, as the inaugural speaker in the second annual American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series.

Looking at the painting and the photo together reminds me of the experience of watching a landscape artist work en plein air and glancing back and forth between the canvas and the subject. In between lies the vast world of interpretation.