SAAM Stories

Greetings from D.C. where change comes every four—or sometimes eight—years. It's an interesting time to be in the nation's capital. On January 20th, our newest president will be sworn in; his election was a momentous achievement in so many ways.

What’s better than an evening at a museum while the world around you is settling down for the night: it’s magic.

Many people mistake days mentioned in the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas" for the days preceding December 25. In actuality, however, the song refers to the twelve days after Christmas.

I think of Ansel Adams as the Walt Whitman of American photography, creating "silent songs" about monumental landscapes. Georgia O'Keeffe, on the other hand, reminds me of Emily Dickinson.

"I didn't choose painting," Grace Hartigan once told an interviewer, "It chose me. I didn't have any talent. I just had genius."

We've just turned the last page on this year's calendar and it's time to count down the days remaining in 2008. To take a good look at the last month of the year, I've chosen December from Harry Cimino's Marchbanks Calendar.

George Gurney, American Art's Deputy Chief Curator, came by my desk this afternoon to tell me today marked a special occasion in the art world.

Who'd have thought that spending an hour and a half with a lawyer could be so entertaining? Local attorney Joshua Kaufman of Venable LLP enlighted the audience at American Art the other night on the legal issues of acquiring, owning, inheriting, and selling art, from the big picture to the fine print.

Is your wife begging you to part with your old Little League trophies or that shuffleboard MVP figurine from the '79 singles cruise? Furthermore, have you always wanted to be immortalized in a monumental work of art? Then New York artist Jean Shin has a project with your name on it.

December 1 is World AIDS Day as well as what was once known as A Day Without Art. That began December 1, 1989, in response to the AIDS crisis and in honor of all the artists who lost their lives or were affected by the disease.

George Elbert Burr created this menu for a Thanksgiving dinner in 1905 that included consomme, English plum pudding, charlotte russe (a dessert of cream and ladyfingers), and of course, the turkey, illustrated here in a simple pen and ink and watercolor drawing.

O'Keeffe's Manhattan was created for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. If the flowers don’t seem like typical O’Keeffe, they’re not: she based them on paper and cloth decorative flowers created by Hispanic women in New Mexico.

Fotoweek DC, a week-long celebration of photography here in the nation’s capital, is being celebrated at the American Art Museum with a series of nightly contemporary photo landscape projections on the walls of our Kogod Courtyard.

It's part of my job at the Luce Center for American Art's information desk to explain the concept of the Center to visitors. But I can tell how eager they are to begin exploring when, midway through our conversation, their eyes begin to wander. If they happen to notice a particular case in the craft section, the next question I hear is frequently, "Are those quilts?"

In September, SAAM launched an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) titled Ghosts of a Chance. SAAM is the first museum to host an ARG, which is an immersive gaming experience that intentionally blurs the line between reality and fiction, inviting players to interact with the story using tools that are part of their everyday lives such as web sites, email, and cell phones.

The grand Renwick Gallery, which is part of SAAM, was built in the mid nineteenth century to house the art collection of Washington banker and philanthropist William Wilson Corcoran. From the beginning the Renwick was an important building, and Corcoran was a superstar mover and shaker in D.C.

A Brush with Georgia O'Keeffe is a play about the artist who is being celebrated—along with photographer Ansel Adams—in SAAM's current exhibition, Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities. Actress and playwright Natalie Mosco stars in the play she wrote about O'Keeffe and the important people in her life, most notably her husband, photographer and general mover and shaker, Alfred Stieglitz.

Lewis Nerman is a passionate collector of contemporary art. In 2007, he and his family opened the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas.