SAAM Stories

This year marks the seventh Lucelia Artist Award, an annual award in which the Smithsonian American Art Museum recognizes an artist under age 50 for his or her contribution to contemporary art.

It's a favorite pastime of curmudgeons everywhere: Setting faux-naive paintings alongside naive paintings and asking supposed art experts to pick the real from the fake. Radar magazine gets in on the act here, daring savvy readers to prove through an online quiz that they're not faking it when they say they know what art is.

Workers are now installing radiant heating/cooling tubes and the infrastructure for the water features—yes, I said water features—in the courtyard floor.

The most significant lesson in John Hanhardt's last lecture on new media art concerned historical revisionism. Hanhardt professes that contemporary video artists—the subject of his fourth and final installment—worked with unexpected sources in their work, not merely by drawing inspiration from and references to the Western art-historical canon in the way that artists in other media do.

Ken Johnson raises several good questions in his New York Times piece, where he takes the pulse of current sculpture by discussing what's up in the galleries this month.

Looking over some Washington Post archives, I found this review by Michael O'Sullivan of a show that was up at American University's Katzen Arts Center earlier this spring.

SAAM New Media projects have just won two MUSE awards from the American Association of Museums. The MUSE awards recognize excellence in the use of media and technology in museums.

"Herman Melville's cursed wanderers, Raymond Chandler's tough guys, and Walt Whitman's solitary individualists"—that's how one art critic described H. C. Westermann's person and works, a description that captures his work as well as his biography.

In This Case is a series of periodic posts on art in the Luce Foundation Center, a visible art storage facility at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that displays more than 3,300 pieces in fifty-seven cases.

Saturday, improv comedy group Now This! will be improvising scenes based on Saul Steinberg's New Yorker cartoons. Sunday, New Yorker Cartoon Editor Bob Mankoff talks about Steinberg's early work.

For a moment I felt an intense flashback to my college days: I walked into the auditorium, took my seat, and was handed a five-page handout listing slides and films that would be shown (complete with a bibliography for the lecture). A reporter's notebook seemed suddenly small for the note-taking task.

In This Case is a series of periodic posts on art in the Luce Foundation Center, a visible art storage facility at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that displays more than 3,300 pieces in fifty-seven cases.

The upcoming exhibition of Sean Scully's prints puts me in mind of a conversation I had some time ago with an artist. This artist's paintings were (and still are) greatly in demand, but they're not the only work that he does.

Tuesday, May 15, John Hanhardt, SAAM's new Senior Media Arts Curator, begins his lecture series about the history and directions of media arts in the U.S. We on the Web team are pretty excited about having John as a colleague and though he's quite well known in the field this is a bit of a coming out for him and SAAM's media arts program in DC.

We've just launched our third podcast. This one is about art and the American West.

Some noteworthy events this week: a lecture by New Yorker cartoonist Matthew Diffee, a discussion with glass artist Beth Lipman at the Renwick (Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street, NW), and a screening of Seven Days in May.

When Washington-area museums and galleries celebrate in tandem the legacy of the Washington Color School during ColorField.remix, one road will be painted to honor the contributions of one of the city's favorite sons, Gene Davis.

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