American Art Elsewhere
Philadelphia Story: Gary Wills on Thomas Eakins
May 5, 2008
Thomas Eakins's study for a second round of images of the Rush workshop from the SAAM collection: William Rush's Model What would you choose if someone were to ask you to pick an iconic work of art that spoke to...
Drawing on Love: Artists' Love Letters
February 13, 2008
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, ca. 1946. Photograph by Ronald Stein. Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner papers, ca. 1905-1984. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. One of my all-time favorite stories is a love story between Russian poet Anna Akhmatova...
Night Baseball
September 13, 2007
Top: Morris Kantor, Baseball at Night from SAAM's collection. Middle: my photograph of an Oriole’s game. Bottom: Phillips, Marjorie, Night Baseball, 1951, Oil on canvas, 24 1/4 x 36 in.; 61.595 x 91.44 cm., Gift of the artist 1951 or...
Veteran Photography
September 7, 2007
Six William Bell photographs of wounded Civil War solders are on view at SAAM. Even cherished memorial traditions fade as new generations adopt new practices to memorialize the wars, deaths, and other public losses that they deem significant. For example,...
Popular Music, Popular Art
August 31, 2007
Song siren Laura Burhenn with SAAM's Harry Bertoia American art makes a few surprise appearances in popular music this week: James Hampton's Throne Of The Third Heaven Of The Nations Millennium General Assembly is discussed in SAAM's latest podcast on...
Keeping Up With the Joneses
June 14, 2007
Duane Hanson; Woman Eating; 1971; polyester resin, fiberglass, polychromed in oil paint with clothes, table, chair and accessories; 50 x 30 x 55 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2005.22...
ColorField.remix
May 1, 2007
SAAM's Color Field Gallery with works by (from left to right): Paul Reed, Ann Truitt, Gene Davis, and Kenneth Noland. When Washington-area museums and galleries celebrate in tandem the legacy of the Washington Color School during ColorField.remix, one road will...
Etcetera
April 12, 2007
Karoline von Günderode is not a name you'd expect to pop up in modern art—she was a minor German Romantic poet. Her history, however, is fascinating, marked by fatal longing. After being refused romantically by the philologist Friedrich Creuzer, von...
Simryn Gill
April 9, 2007
Simryn Gill's Pearls at the Sackler Gallery. Though it opened in fall last year, Perspectives, a mini-retrospective of Simryn Gill's work at the Sackler Gallery, complements the spring Craft Invitational at the Renwick. One piece in the Sackler show represents...
No Mojitos
March 12, 2007
Armando Reverón (Venezuelan, 1889-1954); Self-Portrait with Dolls, Autorretrato con muñecas; 1948; Charcoal, chalk, and pastel on paper; 25 1/2 x 28 9/16" (64.7 x 72.5 cm); Private collection; © 2007 Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela; Image courtesy of the Museum of...
The Wave Field
March 6, 2007
The Wave Field, completed by Maya Lin in 1995 for the University of Michigan, incorporates two landscapes. There's obviously the physical landscape into which it's built, a 10,000-square-foot patch of earth. But Lin's also addressed a sort of social landscape...
Maya Lin, Prose Poet
February 16, 2007
Maya Lin The AIA's Twenty-five Year Award honors architectural structures that have stood for twenty-five to thirty-five years and have shown lasting importance to the culture throughout. Artdaily reports that AIA selected Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial for the 2007...
artPod
December 28, 2006
An acquaintance of mine carries around JPEGs of her artwork on her iPod—just in case she should ever find herself in an elevator with an interested curator or critic. (More than once I've seen her friends cajole her into showing...
Knights of the Société Anonyme
December 21, 2006
Société Anonyme: Modernism for America Web Site from the Yale University Art Gallery Following the landmark National Gallery of Art Dada exhibition, the Phillips Collection contributes to the District's year of Dada with the exhibition, "Société Anonyme: Modernism for America"....
Appropriation Anxiety
December 12, 2006
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 listening to someone talk about six degrees of separation (for about the hundredth time)...
Art Comes from Art
November 3, 2006
Philip Guston, American, b. Montreal, Canada, 1913 – 1980, Daydreams, 1970, oil on linen, 72 1/8 x 80 1/8 in., Bequest of Musa Guston, 1992 (92.18 ), Part of the Hirshhorn's current exhibition "Ways of Seeing," Image courtesy of the...
More Songs About Texas and Minimalism
October 27, 2006
Donald Judd's Table Object 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. Byrne sums the place up: This town was named after a minor...
Sportsman's Camo
October 19, 2006
Copperhead Snake on Dead Leaves, study from the book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, by Abbott Handerson Thayer One of Chicago's contemporary galleries hosts the photography of Harvey Opgenorth. In his Museum Camouflage series, his guerilla tactics appropriate museum-hung...
Mountains and Clouds
August 10, 2006
Alexander Calder's Mountains and Clouds at the Hart Building A friend who works in the Senate offered to meet me in the Hart Building before heading over to show me around some special collections rooms at the Library of Congress....
Responsive Architecture
July 28, 2006
Architects' depiction of the proposed Parrish Art Museum. © 2006 Herzog & de Meuron From the NYT write-up of the new design for the Parrish Art Museum in Long Island: Typically, architects design museums with the art collection in mind;...
Grand-Pop Parrish
June 7, 2006
Maxfield Parrish, Daybreak 1922, oil In your hurry to cut out of work early before Memorial Day, fill up the cooler, and head toward sunnier climes, you might have missed the news about the rather extraordinary sale of Maxfield Parrish’s...
Hiroshi Sugimoto (Part II)
May 11, 2006
Chrysler Building (Architect: William van Alen), 1997, private collection. Courtesy of the artist. “Pushing out my old large-format camera’s focal length to twice-infinity,” Sugimoto writes, ". . . I discovered that superlative architecture survives the onslaught of blurred photography.” The...
Presenting Dorothy Draper
April 17, 2006
Dorothy Draper, 1937, Courtesy Collection of Dorothy Draper & Co. Inc., The Carleton Varney Design Group. 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....
Hiroshi Sugimoto (Part I)
April 12, 2006
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Polar Bear, 1976 In person, Hiroshi Sugimoto resists the descriptions that apply to his photography; he is not dour or somber but affable, even irreverent. His February 16 onstage conversation with Hirshhorn Museum chief curator Kerry Brougher saw...
Another (Alternate) Year, Another Biennial
March 3, 2006
The 2006 Whitney Biennial opened yesterday. These days biennials are met as often with fanfare as with handwringing about the state of the curated art survey. Mark Stevens discusses this year’s curator–critic matchup in his New York Magazine pregame analysis...
Site Specific
March 1, 2006
The site for the National Museum of African American History and Culture will be just northeast of the Washington Monument and west of the National Museum of American History. In light of the recent passing of both Rosa Parks and...
Olympian
February 22, 2006
Nam June Paik; Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii; 1995; 49-channel closed circuit video installation, neon, steel and electronic components; approx. 15 x 40 x 4 ft.; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Gift of the artist; 2002.23 Want to see this...
The Lonesome, Crowded West
January 27, 2006
Andrea Zittel, A-Z Management and Maintenance Unit Model 003, 1992, Steel, wood, carpet, plastic sink, stove top, mirror, 86 x 94 x 68 inches, ©Andrea Zittel, Image courtesy of the Andrea Rosen Gallery, NY When I take my roadtrip one...
iChiaroscuro
January 19, 2006
Caravaggio: una mostra impossible Exhibition, Loyola University Museum of Art. Photo by Mark Beane/Loyola University Chicago There’s a discussion buzzing on the Eye Level backend about Caravaggio: una mostra impossible, the “impossible” Caravaggio exhibit at the Loyola University Museum of...
Updike Takes On . . .
December 19, 2005
Edward Hopper, People in the Sun, 1960, oil, 40 3/8 x 60 3/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., 1969.47.61 I nearly forgot about the recent NPR interview with John Updike, author of Still...
Miami Art Machine
December 15, 2005
Marion Post Wolcott, Woman lying in the sun, Miami Beach, Florida, 1939, printed later, silver print on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.28 This year I had planned to attend Art...
Coast to Coast With Dana Schutz
December 2, 2005
Dana Schutz, Twin Parts, 2004, Zach Feuer Gallery Economist Tyler Cowen mentioned that he's still thinking about Dana Schutz's paintings after a recent tour through MoMA. There's been no lack of attention for Schutz since 2003, when her works were...
Game of Kings Artists
November 30, 2005
Thomas Anshutz, Checker Players, about 1895, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Orrin Wickersham June, 1967.136.4 (They're playing chess, if you squint.) You'll want to read Ben Davis's Artnet write-up of the Noguchi Museum's exhibition, "The Imagery of Chess Revisited,"...
Westward Spiral
November 22, 2005
Easily one of the iconic visual artworks from the last few decades—and all the more so for having been seen by so few people—Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) has possibly never looked better. Underwater for years, the land art sculpture...
Saving Outdoor Sculpture
November 3, 2005
Walter Anderson, Pelicans at North Key, 1945, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1967.96.1 Found an update in my inbox called Saving Outdoor Sculpture, a Gulf Coast conservation project: The Heritage Emergency National Task Force is acting as a clearinghouse for information...
Katrina and the Arts
October 14, 2005
Kenneth Snelson, Maquette for Tree I, 1979, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1980.49.11 While focusing on providing material aid and relief to the thousands displaced by Hurricane Katrina, it's certainly the case that much in the way of charity will be...
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