Lectures on American Art

Art Attack with Lee Sandstead

July 23, 2009

Lee Sandstead: Before Art and After Art Art historian and Travel Channel host Lee Sandstead welcomes each visitor at the door of the McEvoy Auditorium wearing what he called hippie pants ("genuine polyester, not the fake stuff we have today")...

Jean Shin

July 6, 2009

Jean Shin's Everyday Monuments If you're walking through a city, say New York or Washington D.C., you may want to have Jean Shin by your side. You may know your way around familiar streets, but through Shin's eyes you'll be...

Collecting African American Art

May 29, 2009

Dr. Walter O. Evans. Dr. Walter O. Evans, named one of 'America's Top 100 Collectors' by Art & Antiques magazine in 2006, spoke the other night as part of the Collectors' Roundtable series on "Collecting outside the Canon." He began...

Roz Chast on Charles Addams: Laughter, Tears, and Boiling Oil

May 19, 2009

Renowned New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast was the fourth and final speaker in this year's American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series and often had the crowded auditorium in stitches. Like many people, I came to love Chast's work through the pages...

Jamaica Kincaid on Being Kept In

May 5, 2009

Edward Lamson Henry, Kept In, 1889, oil, 14" x 18", Fenimore Art Museum, New York State Historical Association On a recent Saturday afternoon writer Jamaica Kincaid offered ninety minutes of personal remembrances in one of the most interesting and heartfelt...

Collectors' Roundtable: Keith F. Davis on Collecting Photographs

April 13, 2009

American Art's Southworth and Hawes daguerreotype: A Bride and Her Bridesmaids The Hallmark Photo Collection (yes, that Hallmark) began in the early 1960s, and was even displayed in a gallery on the ground level of their flagship store in Manhattan....

John Waters on Cy Twombly

March 30, 2009

Letter of Resignation XXXI by Cy Twombly, 1967, © Cy Twombly "You make me feel so respectable," writer and filmmaker John Waters wryly remarked after a rousing welcome to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, then added, "We'll see what we...

Cory Arcangel and Media Arts at American Art

March 11, 2009

Cory Arcangel, installation view of Super Mario Movie, 2005 Not having grown up a joystick jockey, Cory Arcangel's lecture and work, presented at the American Art Museum on Thursday March 5, helped me ‘get' video games for the first time....

Frank Gohlke's World in Black and White (and sometimes color)

February 18, 2009

Frank Gohlke, Chemical Brook enters the Sudbury River, Ashland, Massachusetts, December 1991, Chromogenic development print, Collection of the artist, © 1991 Frank Gohlke On Thursday evening, January 29, photographer Frank Gohlke presented Stories in the Dirt, Stories in the Air,...

Collector's Roundtable: Art and the Law

December 9, 2008

Joshua Kaufman Who'd have thought that spending an hour and a half with a lawyer could be so entertaining? Local attorney Joshua Kaufman of Venable LLP enlighted the audience at American Art the other night on the legal issues of...