American Art Everywhere

Robert Storr: Make New Friends, but Keep the Old

April 11, 2008

"Contemporary art," says Robert Storr, "is simply the most recent of modern art and modern art is an ongoing phenomenon." That line from a recent lecture on museums and collecting modern and contemporary art delivered by Storr, the artist, critic,...

Merce C

April 4, 2008

Merce C by Franz Kline Merce Cunningham, at 87, is still going strong. The esteemed choreographer, who has collaborated with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and many others, is one of the pioneers of contemporary dance. He was also...

Stephen Colbert Hung at the National Portrait Gallery!

January 22, 2008

The media's all over this one. Stephen Colbert's portrait hangs to the left of the men's room. Washington... Lincoln... Kennedy... and now Colbert. Just in case a writers' strike and a presidential campaign in full swing weren't enough to keep...

Seeing Things: Art and Love

January 15, 2008

This is part of a series of personal observations about how people experience and explore museums. Albert Bierstadt; Among the Sierra Nevada, California; 1868; oil; 72 x 120 1/8 in.; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Bequest of Helen Huntington Hull, granddaughter...

Lucelia Artist Award Class of 2007

August 3, 2007

This year marks the seventh Lucelia Artist Award, an annual award in which the Smithsonian American Art Museum recognizes an artist under age 50 for his or her contribution to contemporary art. Funded by the New York–based Lucelia Foundation, the...

Tear Down That Wall!

July 19, 2007

It's a favorite pastime of curmudgeons everywhere: Setting faux-naive paintings alongside naive paintings and asking supposed art experts to pick the real from the fake. Radar magazine gets in on the act here, daring savvy readers to prove through an...

The Media Arts, conclusion

June 28, 2007

Still from Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho The most significant lesson in John Hanhardt's last lecture on new media art concerned historical revisionism. Hanhardt professes that contemporary video artists—the subject of his fourth and final installment—worked with unexpected sources in...

Sculpture as Anything

June 21, 2007

Tom Friedman, Open Black Box, 2006, Black construction paper, 137 in. x 137 in. x 137 in., Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery Ken Johnson raises several good questions in his New York Times piece, where he takes the pulse of current...

Podcasting the American West

May 11, 2007

Scene from the Washington National Opera's Dream of the Pacific, performed in our McEvoy Auditorium last summer. Photo by Karin Cooper for the Washington National Opera. We've just launched our third podcast. This one is about art and the American...

Art in America (by way of France)

November 14, 2006

Jack (Jackson Pollock), Charles Pollock, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Collection of Elizabeth Pollock, 1976.65.7. What if Jackson Pollock hadn't been born in Cody, Wyoming, but rather Moulins sur Allier in France?...

Wouldn't It Be Nice...

September 27, 2006

Former MacArthur recipient and Lucelia Award winner: Kara Walker, Cut, 1988, Cut paper and adhesive on wall, Courtesy Brent Sikkema NYC . . . to be recognized via secret nomination as a genius and rewarded $100,000 per year for the...

Neon Golden

September 18, 2006

More than 66,000 photographs of neon appear on Flickr. 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...

Manifest Destiny

March 28, 2006

The Copely (sic) crater on Mercury. From the Center for Planetary Sciences. 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...

Safire's Spreadsheet

March 24, 2006

A grammar maven and self-described “vituperative right-wing scandalmonger,” former New York Times opinion columnist William Safire is not your typical arts advocate. But Safire wants you to rethink not only the politics of art but art itself, according to Philip...

Lucelia Class of '06

February 6, 2006

[Opens envelope] And the 14 nominees for the 2006 Smithsonian American Art Museum Lucelia Artist Award are [drum roll]: Laylah Ali Janine Antoni The Center for Land Use Interpretation (Matthew Coolidge) Spencer Finch Tom Friedman Maureen Gallace Ellen Gallagher Jon...

Forward Motion

February 1, 2006

The Walker Blogs In Artnet's predictions for 2006, art dealer Barry Neuman augurs on blogs: I think it's a safe bet that there will be 50 to 60 new and bona fide (i.e., seriously authored by qualified people) art world...

Primetime Artists

January 6, 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...

Sense and Design

December 29, 2005

Alexander Calder, Pin, n.d., Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1968.7.1 Designer Michael Rock of 2x4 on Dutch design: I don’t consider Dutch Design to be design generated in the Netherlands. I consider Dutch Design a kind of work, or an attitude...

Out for a Stroll

October 20, 2005

Robert Cottingham's Art juxtaposed with a photograph of the Clydes Restaurant sign installation (Photo by Jeff Gates). When you work in an office building, especially if you sit at a computer all day, you need to force yourself to get...