SAAM Stories

What can paint on canvas do better than a photograph?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a special project here at SAAM in which Advanced Placement Art History students from the Holton-Arms and Landon Schools here in Washington, D.C. visited our Renwick Gallery of American Craft. Their assignment was to research one of our artworks and produce a podcast about the piece they chose.

One fine, crisp morning last week, as you were comfy at home reading Time Magazine’s feature on architect Sir Norman Foster, I was outside the museum in my hard hat and steel-toed boots shivering through a stakeout of our own Foster project.

“Pushing out my old large-format camera’s focal length to twice-infinity,” Hiroshi Sugimoto writes, ". . . I discovered that superlative architecture survives the onslaught of blurred photography.”

Last month I picked up on an item from the American Art collection highlighted by MAN-scribe Tyler Green: a curious painting of an electric chair by Pop confection artist Wayne Thiebaud. As it happens, I’ve been thinking about Thiebaud since I attended the Nova Art Fair in Chicago, where a number of artworks referenced him directly, and more did so inadvertently. He seems to be on a lot of artists’ radar.

Today we are launching Meet Me at Midnight, an interactive art mystery Web site for kids. It's perfect for eight- to ten-year-olds and is meant to be a fun intro to visiting the museum and seeing some cool artwork. Of course, we hope to teach a little something along the way.

Last week Kriston posted his impressions of the newly renovated Old Patent Office building which will house SAAM and the National Portrait Gallery come July 1.

Eye Level has won a MUSE Award from the American Association of Museums—we took home a silver in “Two-Way Communication Projects.”

Congratulations are in order for Matthew Coolidge, director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) and winner of the 2006 SAAM Lucelia Artist Award.

Check out SAAM’s new Interact feature—Speaking of Pictures—which allows you to roll over an art image to find hidden meanings.

Last week All Things Considered ran a feature by Lynn Neary about the restoration of the Old Patent Office building, which houses the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.

There’s nothing like looking at artworks with fresh eyes—or, at least, watching others look with fresh eyes.

If you don't know the name, you know her work. She is the incredible Dorothy Draper (1889-1969), and she is having a banner year.

In person, Hiroshi Sugimoto resists the descriptions that apply to his photography; he is not dour or somber but affable, even irreverent.

Recently my roommate and I found ourselves tossed out of the Dada exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. No, not for any Dada-inspired improvised performances—merely because the museum closed. We showed up at the museum at 2:30 p.m. or so on a Saturday and hadn't finished looking through the final room when the museum announced last call.

Tyler Green writes about an off-key Wayne Thiebaud given to the Smithsonian American Art Museum last year as part of a bequest by Arthur and Edith Levin. It's a 1957 painting of an electric chair, which places Thiebaud on the capital punishment beat several years before Andy Warhol stepped his Sing Sing photograph into production in the early 1960s for his iconic electric chair series.

The Museums and the Web conference announced the winners of its Best of the Web competition Friday in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

This doesn't specifically concern American art—or even anything on the planet Earth—but of the craters on the planet Mercury named after important terrestrial cultural figures, only one American artist and one American architect are represented: respectively, John Singleton Copley (latitude: 38.4S, longitude: 85.2W) and Louis Sullivan (latitude: 16.9S, longitude: 86.3W).