SAAM Stories

The Smithsonian American Art Museum recently launched ¡del Corazón!, an online catalogue of Latino art from the United States.

For the show that he curated here in D.C., New York–based artist José Ruiz writes that he was prompted by a bit of wordplay:

I was watching a backlog of Desperate Housewives episodes on TiVo the other evening and suddenly I noticed something familiar. When Bree is confronting her new husband Orson, there in the background hangs The Girl I Left Behind Me by Eastman Johnson. The original painting hangs in SAAM's second floor galleries.

On this date last year we launched Eye Level.

Excess is not usually associated with an artist whose lifestyle has been characterized as ascetic and whose art is contained on an intimate scale. Yet Cornell indeed engaged in marvelous excess. Just imagine the contents of his tiny house at the time of his death: easily three thousand books and magazines, a comparable number of record albums and vintage films, enough diaries and letters to now fill more than thirty reels of microfilm, and tens of thousands of examples of ephemera

Lynda gives a talk about the exhibition at 3pm on Saturday, November 18, 2006. (Make sure you check the link for any last-minute updates.) The docents give highlights tours at noon and 2pm daily.

What if Jackson Pollock hadn't been born in Cody, Wyoming, but rather Moulins sur Allier in France? Would critics and enthusiasts have written paeans to the artist's early years in the Auvergne?

In 1970 John Baldessari was using an abandoned theater for a studio, and he'd filled it completely with paintings from the early 1950s through the late 1960s. At some point he surveyed the studio as some people might look at a crowded closet and decided the paintings were "a problem to solve."

Via Tyler Green, earlier this year David Byrne—the extraordinary pop musician, best known for helming the Talking Heads—blogged about his trip to Marfa, Texas

Enjoy a bird’s-eye view of the undulating glass canopy designed by renowned architect Norman Foster of Foster and Partners.

One of Chicago's contemporary galleries hosts the photography of Harvey Opgenorth. In his Museum Camouflage series, his guerilla tactics appropriate museum-hung masterworks by artists ranging from Christopher Wool to Henri Matisse: he stands in front of the works wearing clothing painted to match the compositions and photographs the result.

Two paintings from the Luce Center deserve mention together—not merely because each is an example from the American vein of Symbolist painting, but because both depict light in unnatural ways.

If you're a Big City museum and you want your visitors to be able to find you easily, it's a good thing if the cab drivers in your Big City know where you are. So the marketing wizards at SAAM and the National Portrait Gallery orchestrated an event for cabbies yesterday morning.

American Art in a Global Context: An International Symposium has just started, and we're Webcasting live from our Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium. We'll have a permanent link to today's Webcast on the site tomorrow morning, and Friday's and Saturday's events will be Webcast and archived also.

. . . to be recognized via secret nomination as a genius and rewarded $100,000 per year for the next five years—money to do with as your genius mind pleases? Those of us who will spend yet another year toiling in obscurity, waiting for our shot, may gaze in admiration upon the winners of this year's MacArthur Awards.

In September's Atlantic Monthly, libertarian technology writer and general aesthete Virginia Postrel writes about the transformation that neon lights have undergone over the course of the century—"from marketing tool to tacky trash to folk art," reads the tagline.

SAAM conservator Hugh Shockey has been hard at work conserving John Rogers' Taking the Oath and Drawing Rations.

Visitors may be surprised to learn that this glorious cityscape of Manhattan, hanging in our first-floor galleries, is by Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), an artist known for her haunting desert landscapes and floral paintings.