Displaying items by tag: smithsonian american art museum

The Smithsonian American Art Museum, beating its New York archrival to the punch, announced Monday what it called the first retrospective of Irving Penn's photography in nearly two decades.

"Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty," opening October 23, will feature 146 photographic prints, many of them never exhibited or even seen before, it said in a statement.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is featuring one of the 19th century's most famous sculptures with a new exhibition about artist Hiram Powers' "Greek Slave."

The new exhibition "Measured Perfection" opens Friday. The museum says the exhibit reveals the inner workings of the artist and innovator who adapted long-established traditions in sculpture to new technologies of the 1800s.

Nineteen major paintings lent from the private collection of Thelma and Melvin Lenkin of Chevy Chase, Md., are on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through Aug. 16. Mary Cassatt’s renowned “Reading ‘Le Figaro’” is joined by major oil paintings by George Bellows, Martin Johnson Heade, John Singer Sargent, John Sloan, William Glackens, John La Farge, Everett Shinn and others. These artworks have been installed on the second-floor galleries of the museum within the chronological flow of the museum’s permanent collection to create a narrative around the excitement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in America, a “coming-of-age” period in American art. Many of the works are on public view for the first time.

Rarely seen American paintings from a private family collection in Maryland will be going on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The museum said Thursday that Thelma and Melvin Lenkin of Chevy Chase, Maryland, are lending 19 major paintings to the museum for display April 17 through Aug. 16.

The Lenkin collection includes masterworks of American impressionism and from the Ashcan school, portraying scenes of daily life in New York.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum announced today the creation of The American Art Collaborative (AAC), a consortium of 14 American museums committed to building the next generation of digital searches and scholarly advancement. Members of the Collaborative are meeting in Washington, D.C., this week to move from planning to implementation of their Linked Open Data Initiative, which seeks to expand the possibilities inherent in linking museum collections through Linked Open Data (LOD).

The Collaborative plans to create a diverse critical mass of LOD on the Web on the subject of American art by putting the collections of the participating museums in the cloud and tagging this data as LOD.

The High Museum of Art has announced that Katherine Jentleson will become its curator of folk and self-taught art. The position, which has gone unfilled for nearly two years, was endowed last summer through a $2.5 million gift from Atlanta patrons Dan Boone and his late wife Merrie Boone.

Jentleson, a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Duke University and the 2014-15 Douglass Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, will start at the High in September, She has worked at New York’s American Folk Art Museum and curated or assisted in organizing exhibits at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, N.C.

Plenty of collectors want to donate artworks to museums, but the museums don't always welcome them with open arms. "We say 'no thanks' 19 times out of 20," says Betsy Broun, director at the American Art Museum. Sometimes the works aren't museum-quality, other times they don't fit with the museums' philosophy.

But in 1986, representatives from the Sara Roby Foundation called the Smithsonian with an offer it couldn't refuse: paintings by Edward Hopper, Raphael Soyer, Reginald Marsh and many more. They were all collected by Roby, who, in the early 1950s, took on a mission: to save Realistic art from the maws of Abstract Expressionism. The at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum.

Looking to visit the Smithsonian American Art Museum without actually going to the Smithsonian? You might soon be able to do so from the comfort of your own smartphone.

On Friday, the White House announced in a blog post that the Smithsonian American Art Museum would soon open up its digitized collection to developers so they can build it into educational apps. According to the White House, “even museum curators do not have easily accessible information about their art collections. This information will soon be available to everyone.”

The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. announced that they have acquired 100 photographs from The Irving Penn Foundation. Irving Penn, one of the most celebrated artists of the 20^th century, revolutionized fashion photography and was also well known for his still lifes and portraits that frequently appeared in Vogue.

The recently acquired photographs include rare, mostly unpublished works from the late 1930s and 1940s, images of post-war Europe and iconic portraits of celebrated figures such as Agnes de Mille, Langston Hughes and Truman Capote. The collection also includes commercial photography, self-portraits and some of Penn’s most recognizable fashion images. Penn had donated 61 photographs, spanning from 1944 to 1986, to the Smithsonian during his lifetime. He also gifted 60 works to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in 1990.

To celebrate the acquisition and the expansion of the Smithsonian’s Penn holdings, the museum will organize a touring exhibition of approximately 160 works that will open at the Smithsonian in the fall of 2015.

On Tuesday, May 21, 2013, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced that 2,000 museums across the country will offer free admission to active duty military personnel and their families in honor of Memorial Day on May 27, 2013. The announcement was made at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

Participating fine art museums include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The NEA in cooperation with the Department of Defense and Blue Star Families organizes the annual initiative, which lasts through Labor Day weekend (September 2, 2013).

For more information visit www.arts.goc/bluestarmuseums.