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  Location within Washington, D.C. | |
| Established | 2005 |
|---|---|
| Location | 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW Washington, DC 20016 |
| Coordinates | 38°56′21″N77°05′13″W / 38.9393°N 77.087°W |
| Type | Art museum |
| Director | Jack Rasmussen |
| Public transit access |  Tenleytown–AU |
| Website | http://www.american.edu/museum |
The American University Museum is located within the Katzen Arts Center at the American University in Washington, DC.
The American University Museum consists of a three-story, 30,000-square-foot (2,800 m2) museum and sculpture garden. The region’s largest university facility for exhibiting art, the museum’s permanent collection highlights the holdings of the Katzen and Watkins collections. Rotating exhibitions emphasize regional, national, and international contemporary art.
The Katzen Collection is a private collection donated to the university by Dr. Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen in 2005. The collection includes more than 300 paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures, focusing on Pop Art, Washington art, and glass sculpture. It also contains three large bronze sculptures by Nancy Graves. [1]
The Watkins Collection included more than 4500 works of art, with an emphasis on art produced in the Washington area since the 1940s. The collection was created in 1945 as a memorial to C. Law Watkins, the former chair of the Department of Art at American University. Originally only 25 works, it has been augmented by later donations. [2]
The Corcoran Legacy Collection includes more than 9,000 works of art from the Corcoran Gallery of Art and includes works by Titian, Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol, Albrecht Dürer, Helen Frankenthaler and the Washington Color School. [3]
Jack Rasmussen, the museum's curator, focuses on rotating exhibitions that emphasize regional, national, international, and contemporary art and artists. The Museum's Kunsthalle style planning ensures constantly changing exhibitions on all three levels of the museum, often with highly relevant, political, and sometimes provocative programming that mirrors Washington, D.C. itself. Approximately 24 exhibitions are mounted annually across the museum's 44,000 square foot space. [4]
In 2006 the museum presented “Contemporary North Korean Art: The Evolution of Socialist Realism,” the first ever exhibition of North Korea political realism artwork ever showcased in the United States. [5] In 2017, the museum presented "Between Two Rounds of Fire, the Exile of the Sea", an Arab modernism exhibition in collaboration with the Barjeel Art Foundation on themes of war from eight different Arab countries and territories. [6]
Via the Alper Initiative for Washington Art, [7] [8] the museum also focuses exhibitions on Washington, DC area artists, and is dedicated to preserving, presenting, and creating the art history of Washington through a book collection, database, events, and exhibitions. [7] [8] The Alper Initiative for Washington Art was made possible through a major financial grant by American University alumna and art advocate Carolyn Small Alper. [9] In 2016 the initiative sponsored a widely acclaimed exhibition titled The Looking Glass: Artist Immigrants of Washington, which was curated by Rasmussen [10] to showcase the immigration stories, experiences, and views of ten Washington, DC area artists - all of whom were immigrants to the United States from Latin America. [5] [11] [12] [13]
The Alper Initiative for Washington Art includes: [7] [14]
Andrea Way is an American artist currently based in Washington, D.C.
The Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center is home to all of the visual and performing arts programs at American University and the American University Museum It is located at Ward Circle, the intersection of Nebraska Avenue and Massachusetts Avenues in Washington, D.C. This 130,000-square-foot (12,000 m2) space, designed to foster interdisciplinary collaboration in the arts, provides instructional, exhibition, and performance space for all the arts disciplines. Its 30,000-square-foot (3,000 m2) art museum exhibits contemporary art from the nation's capital region and the world. The museum gallery is the Washington region's largest university facility for art exhibition.
Cynthia Connolly is an American photographer, curator, graphic designer, and artist.
Carol Brown Goldberg is an American artist working in a variety of media. While primarily a painter creating heavily detailed work as large as 10 feet by 10 feet, she is also known for sculpture, film, and drawing. Her work has ranged from narrative genre paintings to multi-layered abstractions to realistic portraits to intricate gardens and jungles.
Val Edwin Lewton was a painter and museum exhibition designer. As an artist, he created Realist acrylic paintings and watercolors of urban and suburban scenes, predominantly in the Washington, D.C., area, where he lived and exhibited.
Michael Janis is an American artist currently residing in Washington, DC where he is one of the directors of the Washington Glass School. He is known for his work on glass using the exceptionally difficult sgraffito technique on glass.
Tim Tate is an American artist and the co-founder of the Washington Glass School in the Greater Washington, DC capital area. The school was founded in 2001 and is now the second largest warm glass school in the United States. Tate was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1989 and was told that he had a year left to live. As a result, Tate decided to begin working with glass in order to leave a legacy behind. Over a decade ago, Tate began incorporating video and embedded electronics into his glass sculptures, thus becoming one of the first artists to migrate and integrate the relatively new form of video art into sculptural works. In 2019 he was selected to represent the United States at the sixth edition of the GLASSTRESS exhibition at the Venice Biennale.
Joe Shannon is a stateside Puerto Rican artist, curator, art critic, and writer.
Susana Raab is an American fine art and documentary photographer based in Washington, D.C. She was born in Lima, Peru.
Amber Robles-Gordon is an American mixed media visual artist. She resides in Washington, DC and predominantly works with found objects and textiles to create assemblages, large-scale sculptures, installations and public artwork.
Michelle Lisa Herman is an American contemporary and conceptual artist who works with sculpture, video, installation, and painting. Herman's work draws on theoretical and philosophical research, feminist and disability politics, comedy, and conceptualism and investigates ideas of agency and invisible systems of power in technologically mediated society. Herman is currently based in Washington, DC.
Ric Garcia is an American fine arts painter, digital printmaker, and curator of Cuban ancestry currently working and residing in the Greater Washington, DC area.
Jack Boul is an artist and teacher based in Washington, D.C., whose oil paintings, monotypes and sculpture are included in museums including the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection.
Minnie Klavans was an American artist whose work is held by the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the American University Museum, among others.
Thomas Patrick Green, Jr., known more commonly as Tom Green, was an American painter and professor. He taught at Corcoran College of Art and Design, for many years. Green is associated with the Washington Color School art movement.
Kenneth Victor Young (1933–2017), was an American artist, educator, and designer. He is associated with the Washington Color School art movement. He worked at the Smithsonian Institution as an exhibit designer for 35 years.
Frida Larios is a Central American visual and sculptural artist best known for her typo-graphic art and research related to Maya language systems.
Yuri "George" Schwebler (1942–1990), was a Yugoslavia-born American conceptual artist and sculptor. He was active in the arts in the 1970s in Washington, D.C., and most notably in February 1974, he transformed the Washington Monument into a sundial. He showed his work at the Jefferson Place Gallery.
The Looking Glass: Artist Immigrants of Washington was a curated invitational art exhibition held from June 18 through August 14, 2016 at The American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC.
The Washington Women's Art Center (WWAC) was a nonprofit feminist art collective in Washington, D.C. It existed for over a decade, from 1975 to 1988.
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