Annie Leibovitz, Plano, Illinois, 2011. © Annie Leibovitz, 2011 On Tuesday, January 24, a couple of hours before the president delivered his address to Congress, Annie Leibovitz presented her own state of the union to a sold-out audience at American Art’s McEvoy Auditorium. Hers was a photographic pilgrimage–a meditation on the poetry of place–that tookRead… Read more »
Fabrication is underway for the 20 “genre kiosks” for The Art of Video Games exhibition. The Art of Video Games exhibition opens in less than two months (on March 16, 2012), so things are getting a little hectic around the museum! Early in January, the exhibits team did a round of testing for the 5Read… Read more »
Top: the winning postcard of our Renwick 40th Anniversary postcard contest by Becca Kallem. Bottom: Our runner-up entry is by Joanna Barnum. American Art’s Renwick Gallery is celebrating its 40th year—40 years of the best in American craft, decorative arts, exhibitions, and programs. To commemorate this milestone, we challenged our visitors to design a postcardRead… Read more »
Join us for the documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters To celebrate the opening of The Art of Video Games exhibition, we will be holding three jam-packed days of events and activities from Friday, March 16 through Sunday, March 18, 2012. The schedule kicks off on Friday with panel discussions that includeRead… Read more »
This post is the first of an ongoing series on Eye Level: “Q and Art” and is the successor to our series “The Best of Ask Joan of Art.” Begun in 1993, Ask Joan of Art was the longest-running arts-based electronic reference service in the country. We retired the service late last year but wantRead… Read more »
Annie Leibovitz, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, 2009, © Annie Leibovitz. From Pilgrimage (Random House, 2011) Pilgrimage is a personal journey by photographer Annie Leibovitz, celebrated over the decades for her astute portraits of the cultural landscape. In Pilgrimage, the landscape is real: out of the photographer’s studio and into icons of America, from the homesRead… Read more »
Washington National Opera Principal Coach for the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists Ken Weiss provides some insider information on how he selected the artists and repertoire for the upcoming January 22 performance in the Renwick Gallery‘s Grand Salon, in a discussion with Jo Ann Gillula, Chief of External Affairs at the museum. Washington National Opera Domingo CafritzRead… Read more »
Cross stitch postcard celebrating the Renwick’s 40 years by Katie Crooks. The Renwick Gallery is celebrating a milestone year in 2012, its 40th! To give our audience a chance to participate in the fun, we’re holding a postcard design contest. We want to see how visitors (both onsite and online) translate the best in AmericanRead… Read more »
Helen Frankenthaler’s Summerscene, Provincetown Helen Frankenthalter, the last of the Abstract Expressionists, died on December 27, 2011, at the age of eighty-three. In 1951, when she was only twenty-three, she began to soak, or stain, her canvasses with extremely thin paint. The following year, she created Mountains and Sea, a large work that is oftenRead… Read more »
Margaret E. Knight, Patent Model of Machine for Making Paper Bags, 1879, U.S. Patent No. 220925, wood, brass, paper and paint, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center The current exhibition, The Great American Hall of Wonders celebrates the 19th-century American spirit of ingenuity through the examination of art, science, andRead… Read more »