Picture This: Fliptastic August 5, 2009

Visitors to American Art use our Flip Mino video camera to create their own tours of the museum.

Have you ever dreamed of being a star? If so, you are in luck. Right now in the Luce Foundation Center you can borrow a Flip Mino and shoot a video of your museum visit. Check out the videos other visitors have made as part of the "Share Your DC" program created by Destination DC and Travel + Leisure.

• Museum Tour, Flip Mino, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Posted by Tierney on August 5, 2009 in Picture This
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Picture This: Taking Down a House of Cards
July 31, 2009



De-installing Chance City by Jean Shin

Jean Shin’s exhibition Common Threads just closed at American Art. Once a show is over, American Art’s Registrar’s Office is tasked with de-installing it. If the work is from our permanent collection, each piece is returned to storage or to the Luce Center, our open storage center. After Shin’s work is taken down and packed, it will be returned to the artist and other lenders.

De-installations can take from one day to two weeks or more, depending on the size and the complexity of the show. Here Assistant Registrar Jane Paul carefully removes each lottery card, one at a time, from Chance City, a piece made up of thousands of cards. Each card is stacked with others of its kind before being packed up and sent home. Typically art handlers wear gloves when handling artwork. This work was handled without gloves at the artist’s request.



• Jean Shin, Contemporary Art, Lottery Cards, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Posted by Jeff on July 31, 2009 in Picture This
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Seeing Things (4): On Beauty
July 27, 2009

This is the fourth in a series of personal observations about how people experience and explore museums. Take a look at Howard's other blog posts on the subject: Seeing Things (1), Seeing Things (2): Art and Love, and Seeing Things (3): Seeing in the Dark.



Untitled by Sam Francis

What is beauty?

Don't worry, I'm not going to try and answer that now. It's a beautiful summer day, and I'm walking through American Art looking at art, and watching people as they look at art, and trying to hear a little bit about what they say to each other about what they're seeing.

To me, somehow it all comes down to beauty--the colors the painter chooses to use, as well as his or her stroke and touch. Does similar beauty exist in the video artist's screen or the sculptor's compliant metal? Beauty seems to be everywhere, from the quiet white notes of a Sam Francis painting to the operatic, sweeping compositions of Albert Bierstadt.

I also find beauty in the way people look at the art, and especially when they look at each other right after that. With or without words, art brings us to different conversations and different ways of seeing things.



• Beauty, Sam Francis, Art Museums, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Posted by Howard on July 27, 2009 in American Art Everywhere
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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") with the effervescent greeting, "I'll be your speaker tonight." Fasten your polyester pants; it's going to be an interesting evening.

Sandstead, whose show Art Attack on the Travel Channel has taken him to museums around the country including American Art, lives up to his reputation as "the world's most fired-up art historian." I'd say if you're out having a coffee with Sandstead, make sure he orders a decaf; the man produces his own natural blend of enthusiasm.

But how did Sandstead make the transition from growing up "in a house that was on wheels" to becoming a big wheel in the art world? According to him, it was the combination of education, and, lucky guy, the influence of his French girlfriend, perhaps as he told us, "the only French woman living in Tennessee." Beauty began to surround him. Down went the NASCAR posters and up went the reproduction Rembrandt prints. His life can be divided into two periods: BA and AA, Before Art and After Art. And for Sandstead, the after is where all the fun is.

Sandstead loves the American Art Museum (as well as the Luce Foundation Center) and featured it in an episode of _Art Attack._ He considers it one of the great cultural institutions in the United States. He likes walking its halls and pointing out Albert Bierstadt's _Among the Sierra Nevada, California_ in its own room. The museum offers plenty of examples for Sandstead to talk about one of his favorite periods in American art, from about 1874, almost a decade after the end of the Civil War, to the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922. And he mentions works by Abbott Handerson Thayer and J. William Fosdick. "I love the Smithsonian American Art Museum," he told us. "It's one of the highlights of my career."

What I liked best about Sandstead's presentation, aside from his sheer tsunami of energy, were his thoughts on museums and museum going. "It's not the once in a year Disney trip," he reminded us. "It's more about looking at a few things carefully each trip, rather than trying to take in everything at once. You do it every week. Laugh, cry, skip, but don't touch the paintings."



• Art Attack, Lee Sandstead, Art History, Travel Channel, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Posted by Howard on July 23, 2009 in Lectures on American Art
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Morris Louis: Making Faces
July 20, 2009



Faces by Morris Louis

The son of a Russian immigrant, abstract painter Morris Louis grew up in Baltimore. As an adult, Louis lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, and in Washington, D.C., where, in a small bungalow on Legation Street, NW, he turned his dining room into a studio. Some of his pictures were larger than the room itself, and he had to work on folded canvas. When Louis died before his fiftieth birthday in 1962, six hundred paintings were found rolled up. All of them were quite large, and very few were titled.

So what to make of Faces, then? The wall label cites that as the name of the painting. But it seems unlikely Morris Louis gave that title to the painting. Clement Greenberg, critic and staunch supporter of Louis's work, probably named the painting and gave the title "Veil" to the series.

Jackson Pollock sometimes titled his works with numbers. This system can be confusing, especially as there is more than one One. Titles are useful in that they can provide an entry into what the artist is thinking or feeling, what he or she associates with the work. In Louis's case, however, I'm not sure if the title adds to my understanding and appreciation of it, or if it has led me in a direction that was not the artist's intention. In Louis's art, you can see glimpses or fragments of the world around you. What if instead of Faces, the painting were named Cave or Autobiography ? It would still have the power to draw me to it from across the room, but would my thoughts about the work have been the same?

What associations does the work conjure for you?

See more works by Morris Louis in the museum's collection.


• Morris Louis, Clement Greenberg, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Posted by Howard on July 20, 2009 in American Art Here
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