Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Arts & Culture / Art & Artists

From the 1920s on, major figures in American arts and letters—Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Tennessee Williams and E.E. Cummings—gravitated toward Provincetown.

What Do Jackson Pollock, Tennessee Williams and Norman Mailer Have in Common?

Cape Cod’s dune shacks are American culture’s home away from home

The installation “We the people (detail)” was a deconstructed replica of the Statue of Liberty housed at an art museum in Kassel Germany.

Re-envisioning the Statue of Liberty

Sculptor Danh Vo deconstructs the American icon

The widening of the canal has exposed a trove of fossils, including megalodon teeth.

A New Opportunity at the Panama Canal

The ongoing expansion of the waterway has given Smithsonian researchers a chance to find new fossils

Vince Rossi wields a laser to document a whale fossil in Chile.

How Two Laser Cowboys Saved The Day

Paleontologist Nick Pyenson was in a race against a construction crew to salvage a bed of whale fossils, so he called upon 3-D technologists for help

Ross Braught, a largely forgotten artist who surely knew Jackson Pollock, painted the mural Mnemosyne and the Four Muses for the Kansas City Music Hall.

Where Did Jackson Pollock Get His Ideas?

A talented painter who died poor and forgotten may have inspired the influential American artist’s work in ceramics

None

Winners of Nature’s Best Photography

Through January 2013, the Natural History Museum is home to stunning photographs of wildlife around the world

None

How Posters Helped Shape America and Change the World

One enthusiast’s collection, on exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California, offers a sweeping look at grass-roots movements since the 1960s

None

Chickens Dressed Like Napoleon, Einstein and Other Historical Figures

They came, they clucked and they conquered. Get the story behind these absurd portraits and how they came to be

A diagram of visitor movement in the American Art and Furniture gallery at the Cleveland Museum of Art

What a Physics Student Can Teach Us About How Visitors Walk Through a Museum

By sketching the movements of people at the Cleveland Art Museum, Andrew Oriani laid the groundwork for some deep insights into how art is appreciated

Detail of the Cleveland Apollo Sauroktonos

Questions About Apollo

A stunning statue at the Cleveland Museum raises concerns about the acquisition of antiquities

None

Los Tres Reyes Remember The Age of the Tríos

The Latin American artists discuss how their career began over 50 years ago

None

What Types of Animals Have Been to Space and More Questions From our Readers

You ask, we answer – our Smithsonian experts fill you in on the truths behind your burning questions

Gripping Photos of Fallen Soldiers’ Bedrooms

A photographer’s images of domestic tranquility pay tribute to U.S. service members

Upon the release of the Bangle-era BMW Z4 Coupe in 2006, Business Week observed that it seems to be moving "even when standing still."

How Futurist Art Inspired the Design of a BMW

The Italian art movement that celebrated modernity still moves us 100 years later

Why There’s No Time for Work at the Office

Legal expert Deborah Rhode reveals the true force behind all your meetings

The Case for a New Grant Wood Painting

In which the author argues that an unidentified work at a Nebraska gallery was painted by the American regionalist master

Halo 2 is a first-person shooter game that allows for multiple players as well as online competition. According to video game designer Kellee Santiago, "The music, the visuals, the character designs—they were all taken to a whole new level."

The Essentials: Video Games

Designer Kellee Santiago picks five artful video games that tell the history of the medium

Explore installations, such as Chromosaturation, by Carlos Cruz-Diez, 1965, at the Hirshhorn until May 13.

Here & Now

In Mass Effect 2, human colonies in space mysteriously vanish.

The Art of Video Games

For decades, video games have enthralled and inspired, and now they are the subject of a new exhibit that views them as serious works of art

You probably know Errol Morris as an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker. Roger Ebert called his first film, Gates of Heaven, one of "the ten greatest films ever made."

Errol Morris: The Thinking Man’s Detective

The documentary filmmaker has become America’s most surprising and provocative public intellectual

Page 62 of 111