Stories for September 2006

Thirty Dozen Doughnuts: Thirty Dozen Taxis

September 29, 2006

Cultural and Political Icons hand out breakfast to taxi drivers. If you're a Big City museum and you want your visitors to be able to find you easily, it's a good thing if the cab drivers in your Big City...

American Art in a Global Context
SAAM Symposium Live

September 28, 2006

American Art in a Global Context: An International Symposium has just started, and we're Webcasting live from our Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium. We'll have a permanent link to today's Webcast on the site tomorrow morning, and Friday's and Saturday's events...

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...

Christenberry on the Landscape

September 21, 2006

Signs, near Greensboro, Alabama Bill Christenberry's Southern accent is immediately apparent when he talks; so, too, after listening to him for a few minutes, is that unmistakable Southern charm. He skips lightly past his own professional training (he received an...

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...

Picture This: Statue Conservation

September 11, 2006

SAAM conservator Hugh Shockey has been hard at work conserving John Rogers' Taking the Oath and Drawing Rations. The piece, dating from the 1860s, had been touched up many years ago in an undated conservation. The unknown conservator didn't take...

Give Me Park Avenue

September 1, 2006

Georgia O'Keeffe, Manhattan, 1932, oil, 84 3/8 x 48 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, 1995.3.1 Visitors may be surprised to learn that this glorious cityscape of Manhattan, hanging in our first-floor galleries, is...