Smithsonian American Art Museum
Inaugural Balls on the Mall
If you're the socialite who will be hitting up the slew of black tie balls in DC, then you must have a bottomless wallet and a dance card that's loaded to the hilt. Even with tickets selling for a couple hundred bucks a pop on the low end, these events are already sold out. Take a look at all the p...
January 12, 2009 |
By Jesse Rhodes
Smithsonian Events Week of 1/12-1/18: Edgar Allan Poe and Strange Bodies
Monday, January 12: A Party for Edgar Allan Poe (He's 200, Never More)2009 has a bumper crop of notable bicentennials, notably Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin and, you guessed it, author/poet Edgar Allan Poe. Come celebrate the birth of this literary luminary with dramatic readings and light refres...
January 12, 2009 |
By Jesse Rhodes
Visitors Get to Play Games at American Art
The long-awaited finale to our ARG saga is online! For those who don't know, ARG's are "alternate reality games"—a hybrid of mystery stories and online gaming—popular with new media marketers and online communities.A few months ago the Smithsonian American Art Museum became the nation's first maj...
December 30, 2008 |
By Anika Gupta
American Art Showcases Two Sides of Nature in Photographs
Frank Gohlke's pictures of Midwestern grain elevators and small Texas towns have appeared in more than ten books. On a tour of his new show at the American Art Museum, the guide referred to Gohlke's work as a "challenge" to the popular, almost romantic nature photos of Ansel Adams. Adams was a ma...
December 17, 2008 |
By Anika Gupta
Smithsonian Events Week of 12/15-21
Monday, December 15: Voila Julia!I don’t think anyone can ever really top Dan Aykroyd’s Julia Child impersonation. This is not to say that actress Nancy Robinette won’t come pretty darn close with her portrayal of the gourmand with the golden palette and a wonderfully infectious joie de vivre. This...
December 15, 2008 |
By Jesse Rhodes
Calling All Trophy Holders: Artist Wants Yours
New York-based artist Jean Shin’s installations embody the saying, one person’s trash is another’s treasure. She has collected worn leather shoes, lone socks at laundromats, broken umbrellas, empty pill bottles, old sweaters and dud lottery tickets—"life’s leftovers," as she calls them—and construc...
December 09, 2008 |
By Megan Gambino
Smithsonian Events Week of 12/1-7
Monday, December 1 Resident Associate Program LectureFor some, the holidays can be disastrous. Not because the turkey came out overcooked or you couldn't find the one "gotta have it" toy for your kid—but because you live along a fault line or in the shadow of an active volcano. Come hear geologist ...
December 01, 2008 |
By Jesse Rhodes
Sneak Peek at the film Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
Why are we Around the Mall bloggers so excited about the upcoming Dreamworks 20th Century Fox film, Night at the Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian, set to be released next May? It’s all about ego. Here we have an opportunity to sit in a darkened theater and nitpick over all the inaccuracies.So, le...
November 28, 2008 |
By Jesse Rhodes
What's Up at the Smithsonian This Week 11/10-16
Monday, November 10Just Opened "One Life: The Mask of Lincoln" at the National Portrait Gallery is an examination of Lincoln's use of the era's new art of photography to convey his image to Americans. Drawing on the museum's extensive collection of Lincoln portraits—an archive that charts Lincoln's...
November 10, 2008 |
By Beth Py-Lieberman
The Whole Gory Story: Vampires on Film
With Halloween on the horizon, I had to check out the "Vampires on Film" lecture, courtesy of the Smithsonian Resident Associate Program. The speaker was movie maven and scholar Max Alvarez. It was a well-attended, three-hour tour of horror flicks that make for—more often than not—painfully bad ci...
October 29, 2008 |
By Jesse Rhodes
Georgia O'Keeffe Confirmed You as a Friend on Facebook
If Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams had friended each other on Facebook, what would the two icons of 20th-century modern art have shared with each other?
After all, the pair were friends for more than 50 years. She went camping with him in Yosemite. He stopped by her New Mexico home for visits. An...
October 01, 2008 |
By Beth Py-Lieberman
Get Your Game On
At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, tech-savvy players gather clues in the alternate reality game "Ghosts of a Chance."
October 2008 |
By Anika Gupta
Bill Viola: The Mind's Eye
Video artist Bill Viola dropped his notes on his way up to the podium last Wednesday night at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. With a shrug, he joked that his lecture—the pages now scrambled—would lack order. But the traditional organization one expects from a story or a narrative is decidedly...
September 16, 2008 |
By Megan Gambino
Zora Neale Hurston: A Heart With Room for Every Joy
Zora Neale Hurston was a woman of many talents. Born in 1891, she earned a BA in anthropology at Barnard College and her work documenting African American culture and folklore in the American South earned her a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to continue her ethnographic studies. Hurston also fo...
August 04, 2008 |
By Jesse Rhodes
Speaking of Local Color, Do You Know About Gene Davis?
A new exhibition opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum this past weekend. "Local Color: Washington Painting at Midcentury," blazes with 27 huge color-is-expressive canvases, all works by Washington, D.C.-based artists, Leon Berkowitz, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Sam Gilliam, ...
July 07, 2008 |
By Beth Py-Lieberman
I Can't Live Without That. . .Necklace?
Lectures offered around the Smithsonian tend to bear titles that range from the curiously vague ("Children at Play: An American History") to the esoterically detailed ("Topics in Museum Conservation Lecture: Hygric Swelling of Stone"). So when a talk came up on "Protective Ornaments: Dressed for...
May 02, 2008 |
By Beth Py-Lieberman
I'm Not An Artist And I Don't Play One on TV
On Tuesday, I headed over to the weekly sketching session at the American Art Museum, figuring it would give me a chance to brush up on my drawing, something I’ve neglected in the last few years.About a dozen gathered at the Luce Foundation Center, a three-level storage and study facility with thou...
March 05, 2008 |
By Kenneth R. Fletcher
Color Crazed
The show that opens today at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, "Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975," is to say the least, colorful.The galleries literally breathe color. Large expanses of it are spread playfully and aggressively in geometric shapes, or seemingly splashed randomly across...
February 29, 2008 |
By Beth Py-Lieberman
Tied Together Through the Generations
When Ellen Holen started stitching her sons’ old neckties into a colorful silk quilt some seven decades ago on a central Nebraskan farm, she was probably just being practical, not trying to create a work of art. After all, it was during the Great Depression and she had 10 children — they couldn’t ...
January 02, 2008 |
By admin
John Alexander: Looking Back
John Alexander is an artist who packs a painterly punch. The power of his vivid, expressive imagery solicits a breath-taking effect, especially in a gallery hung with 40 of his big, bold paintings and 27 of his elegant works on paper.Tomorrow, December 20, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM...
December 19, 2007 |
By Beth Py-Lieberman
