Find Us on Our Blog
Find Us on Twitter
Find Us on Facebook
Find Us on YouTube
New Acquisitions
The Smithsonian American Art Museum's collection, which includes artworks in all media- from painting and sculpture to film and media art, photographs, folk art and contemporary craft- reveals key aspects of America's rich artistic and cultural history from the colonial period to today. In recent years, the museum's acquisition efforts have focused on strengthening its modern and contemporary collections.
- Sheila Hicks The Silk Rainforest (about 1975)
- Untitled (1950) by Charles White
- Nam June Paik Archive
Sheila Hicks, The Silk Rainforest (about 1975)
Sheila Hicks, The Silk Rainforest, about 1975, silk, linen, and cotton, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Bob and Lynn Johnston through Educational Ventures, Inc.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum has acquired a significant tapestry by Sheila Hicks, The Silk Rainforest. Hicks is one of the most influential artists working in craft media today. Her architectural installations are considered ambitious expressions in post-war American art and contributed to shifting the perception of fiber from simply a domestic pursuit to an artist’s medium. She has shown a particular sensitivity to weaving traditions, as well as the interplay of color, texture, and space, demonstrating the influence of her education under renowned colorist Josef Albers, his wife, the prominent weaver Anni Albers, and architect Louis Kahn. She was recognized by the American Institute of Architects in 1974 with a gold medal for "the successful integration of art and architecture".
The Silk Rainforest was commissioned for AT&T headquarters in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. The corporation contracted Mildred Constantine, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, to consult on art for its new campus, which was completed in 1975. Having recently juried the International Biennial of Tapestry in Lausanne, Switzerland, Constantine convinced AT&T to furnish its offices with contemporary textiles. Hicks’s commission, the largest for the complex, consisted of two eight-foot by twenty-two-foot tapestries hung on opposite sides of a glass staircase leading to the executive suites. Walking between these rich fiber walls evoked the feeling of entering a rainforest.
AT&T’s textile collection was disbanded when the campus was sold in 2002. Bob and Lynn Johnston, friends of Hicks devoted to the preservation of her work, purchased the tapestries and shipped them to Paris, where Hicks has maintained her studio since 1964. Using the original bolts of hand-woven Bangalore silk, linen thread, and embroidery cotton—materials left dormant for thirty years—Hicks and the small staff responsible for their original manufacture painstakingly restored the works. The extraordinary efforts of these individuals will allow the public to see this wall of fiber in pristine condition.
The Silk Rainforest will be installed in the permanent collection galleries at the Museum’s Renwick Gallery in the fall 2009.
Untitled (1950) by Charles White
Untitled, 1950, ink and graphite on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
Charles White is one of the leading African American artists of the twentieth century. He is best known for the masterful drawings he created throughout his career. In this very intense composition, two figures stare out of a narrow window. The young girl cradles a large doll in her arms. The doll is missing its head, arms, and feet. The larger second figure is possibly an older brother, or perhaps her mother. The cramped space of this composition, made even more confined by the two horizontal planks across the window frame, creates a feeling of tension and claustrophobia.
This drawing is charged with ambiguities and possibilities. What are the figures looking at? What is their relationship? Are they both even looking at the same thing? Why is the doll missing parts of her body? Does her truncated body suggest the limited opportunities the little girl will face? Do the two boards across the window simply confine the figures, or do they also represent how the lives of these two figures are barred from full development by restrictions imposed on people of their race? This powerful composition expresses the anxieties of African American people in pre-civil rights days without reference to a specific incident.
White's bold composition and intensity of expression in this drawing make it one of his most memorable images. His mastery of line to suggest the distinct textures of skin, hair, cloth, and wood, reveal his stature as one of the leading draftsmen of the twentieth century. This drawing, which the Museum acquired in 2009, is featured in the exhibition Graphic Masters II: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Nam June Paik Archive
Selections from the Nam June Paik Archive, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Nam June Paik Estate. Photo by Gene Young
The Smithsonian American Art Museum has acquired the complete estate archive of the artist Nam June Paik, one of the most influential artists of his generation who transformed television and video into artists' media. Paik's art and ideas embodied a radical new vision that was embraced around the world and changed global visual culture. With this acquisition, the American Art Museum becomes the institution of record for understanding this provocative artist's profound impact on the art world and for understanding the history of the moving image in twentieth-century art.
The Nam June Paik Archive consists of research material, documentation, correspondence, sculptural robots, and video and television technology. It provides unprecedented insight into Paik's creative process, his sources of inspiration, and the communities of artists on three continents with whom he worked for more than five decades beginning in the 1950s. The collective archive includes thousands of individual items that will be catalogued during the next several years.
The Archive includes early writings on art, history, and technology, correspondence with key artists and collaborators such as Charlotte Moorman and John Cage, a complete collection of videotapes used in his work, production notes for videotape and television projects, plans for video installations, documentation of large-scale television projects such as Guadalcanal Requiem (1977/1979) and installations including the massive The More the Better (1988), sketches, notebooks, and models. The archive also includes a full range of technology that Paik worked with, including a variety of early models of televisions and video projectors, old radios, record players, cameras, and musical instruments supplemented by technical manuals. It includes notes and hand-drawn plans for the Paik-Abe video synthesizer—invented in 1969 with Japanese engineer Shuya Abe—that transformed electronic moving-image making. Additional materials that provide insight into Paik's career are unpublished interviews, audiotapes, vintage photographs, documentation of early Fluxus performances from before and after Paik's move to New York City in 1964, flyers, announcements, posters, catalogues, and works in progress. A variety of toys, games, folk sculptures, banners, wall hangings, and the desk where he painted in his studio are also part of the Archive.
John G. Hanhardt, consulting senior curator for film and media arts at the Museum since 2006, is leading the effort to organize the Nam June Paik Archive and establish a study center at the Museum. He is the foremost expert in Paik's work, and was the organizing curator for two landmark exhibitions, the first in 1982 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the second a retrospective presented as the first exhibition of the new millennium in 2000 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Once the archive is fully catalogued, it will be made available by appointment.
The Nam June Paik Archive is a gift of the Paik Estate through executor Ken Hakuta, the artist's nephew and an emeritus member of the Museum's advisory board of commissioners, with the agreement of Shigeko Kubota, the artist's widow.
The Museum has several significant works by Paik on permanent public view in the galleries, including an early work called Zen for TV (1963/1976), and two ambitious and massive video walls, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (1995) and Megatron/Matrix (1995).
