American Art Everywhere

A Day Without Art/A Day With Art

December 1, 2008

Where Tears Can't Stop by Carlos Alfonzo December 1 is World AIDS Day as well as what was once known as A Day Without Art. That began December 1, 1989, in response to the AIDS crisis and in honor of...


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...