Established | 1829 [1] |
---|---|
Location | 8th and F Streets NW, Washington, D.C. [2] |
Coordinates | 38°53′52″N77°1′24″W / 38.89778°N 77.02333°W |
Type | Art museum |
Visitors | 1.1 million (2022) [3] |
Director | Jane Carpenter Rock [4] |
Public transit access | Gallery Place-Chinatown |
Website | americanart |
The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM, and formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's largest and most inclusive collections of art, from the colonial period to the present, made in the United States. More than 7,000 artists are represented in the museum's collection. Most exhibitions are held in the museum's main building, the Old Patent Office Building (shared with the National Portrait Gallery), while craft-focused exhibitions are shown in the Renwick Gallery.
The museum provides electronic resources to schools and the public through its national education program. It maintains seven online research databases with more than 500,000 records, including the Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture that document more than 400,000 artworks in public and private collections worldwide. Since 1951, the museum has maintained a traveling exhibition program; as of 2013, more than 2.5 million visitors have seen the exhibitions.
In 2022 the museum received 1,100,000 visitors, ranking it seventh in the List of most-visited museums in the United States. [5]
The museum's history can be traced to the creation of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846. The act of Congress establishing the Smithsonian called for it to include "a gallery of art". [6] In its early years, however, little effort was put into developing the art collection, as Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry preferred to focus on scientific research. [7] [8] The collection was first on display in the original Smithsonian Building (now known as the Castle). In 1865, a fire destroyed much of the collection. [9] Those art holdings that survived were mostly loaned to the Library of Congress and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in the following decades. [10] In 1896, the artworks were brought back to the Smithsonian, after Congress appropriated money to construct a fireproof room for them. [11]
The Smithsonian began to refer to its art collection as the National Gallery of Art in 1906, in connection with efforts to receive Harriet Lane Johnston's art collection, which she had bequeathed to the "national art gallery". [12] The collection grew as the Smithsonian buildings grew, and the collection was housed in one or more Smithsonian buildings on the National Mall. [13]
In 1920, the National Gallery of Art was separated from the National Museum, becoming its own branch of the Smithsonian, with William Henry Holmes as its first director. [14] [15] By this time, space had become critical: "Collections to the value of several millions of dollars are in storage or temporarily on exhibition and are crowding out important exhibits and producing a congested condition in the Natural History, Industrial Arts, and Smithsonian Buildings". [16] In 1924, architect Charles A. Platt drew up preliminary plans for a National Gallery of Art to be built on the block next to the Natural History Museum. [16] However, this building was never constructed. [17]
In 1937, the National Gallery of Art became the National Collection of Fine Arts (NCFA), because Andrew Mellon insisted that the previous moniker be given to a new institution formed through his donation of a large art collection. [18] [19] [20]
By the 1950s, the NCFA still occupied a small space in the Natural History Building. [21] In 1958, Congress finally granted the NCFA a home, the Old Patent Office Building, which was about to be vacated by the U.S. Civil Service Commission. [21] [22] The building would be shared with the planned National Portrait Gallery, with the NCFA occupying the northern half of the building. [23] [24] Renovation work on the building began in 1964. [25] The NCFA opened in its new home on May 6, 1968. [26]
The museum's relocation came at an unfortunate time, as the neighborhood had been devastated a month earlier by the Martin Luther King assassination riots. [27] The NCFA struggled to attract visitors over the following decades, as the streets around it remained bleak and lonely. [28] This would remain a factor until the late 1990s, when the work of the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation and the opening of the MCI Center (now Capital One Arena) across the street from the museum sparked a revitalization of the neighborhood. [29]
The NCFA gained a new branch in 1972, opening the Renwick Gallery, dedicated to design and crafts, in a historic building near the White House. [30]
In 1980, the name was changed to the National Museum of American Art, to better distinguish it from other federal art museums and to emphasize its focus on American artists. [31] [32] From 1982 to 1988, Charles C. Eldredge served as the museum director, followed by the tenures of Elizabeth Broun and Stephanie Stebich.
In January 2000, the museum closed to begin a planned three-year, $60-million renovation of the Patent Office Building. [33] To keep the museum's collection accessible to the public during the closure, many of the artworks were sent out in a "Treasures to Go" series of traveling exhibitions, billed as "the largest museum tour in history". [34] [35] The museum's name was changed to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in October 2000 so that the museum and its traveling exhibitions could benefit from the Smithsonian's brand recognition. [36]
After renovations were underway, the plans were broadened in an effort to restore much of the building's original elegance. [37] Many of the building's exceptional architectural features were restored: porticos modeled after the Parthenon in Athens, a curving double staircase, colonnades, vaulted galleries, large windows, and skylights as long as a city block. [38] [39] [40] New features added to the building included the Lunder Conservation Center, the Luce Foundation Center for American Art, Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium, and the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard. [39] Meanwhile, the museum's offices, library, and storage were moved to the nearby Victor Building, freeing up valuable space and allowing the museum to display four times as many artworks as before. [33] [41] The renovation ultimately took six years and $283 million. [42] The museum and the National Portrait Gallery reopened their combined building, renamed as the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, on July 1, 2006. [43]
The Smithsonian American Art Museum shares the historic Old Patent Office building with the National Portrait Gallery, another Smithsonian museum. Although the two museums' names have not changed, they are collectively known as the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture. [38] [44]
Also under the auspices of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Renwick Gallery is a smaller, historic building on Pennsylvania Avenue across the street from the White House. [45] The building originally housed the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. [45] [46] In addition to displaying a large collection of American contemporary craft, several hundred paintings from the museum's permanent collection — hung salon style: one-atop-another and side-by-side — are featured in special installations in the Grand Salon. [45]
Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum has a broad variety of American art, with more than 7,000 artists represented, [47] that covers all regions and art movements found in the United States. SAAM contains the world's largest collection of New Deal art; a collection of contemporary craft, American impressionist paintings, and masterpieces from the Gilded Age; photography, modern folk art, works by African American and Latino artists, images of western expansion, and realist art from the first half of the twentieth century. Among the significant artists represented in its collection are Nam June Paik, Jenny Holzer, David Hockney, Richard Hunt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ching Ho Cheng, John Singer Sargent, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Albert Bierstadt, Frances Farrand Dodge, Edmonia Lewis, Thomas Moran, James Gill, Edward Hopper, John William "Uncle Jack" Dey, Karen LaMonte [48] and Winslow Homer. [13]
SAAM describes itself as being "dedicated to collecting, understanding, and enjoying American art. The museum celebrates the extraordinary creativity of artists whose works reflect the American experience and global connections." [49]
The American Art's main building contains expanded permanent-collection galleries and public spaces. [50] The museum has two innovative public spaces. The Luce Foundation Center for American Art is a visible art storage and study center, which allows visitors to browse more than 3,300 works of the collection. [50] The Lunder Conservation Center is "the first art conservation facility to allow the public permanent behind-the-scenes views of the preservation work of museums". [50]
The Luce Foundation Center, which opened in July 2000, [51] [52] is the first visible art storage and study center in Washington, D.C., [38] and the fourth center to bear the Luce Family name. [38] [53] It has 20,400 square feet on the third and fourth floors of American Art Museum. [38] [54] [55] [56]
It presents more than 3,300 objects in 64 secure glass cases, which quadruples the number of artworks from the permanent collection on public view. [51] [38] The purpose of open storage is to allow patrons to view various niche art that is usually not part of a main exhibition or gala special. [54] The Luce Foundation Center features paintings densely hung on screens; sculptures; crafts and objects by folk and self-taught artists arranged on shelves. [57] [58] Large-scale sculptures are installed on the first floor. [51] The center has John Gellatly's European collection of decorative arts. [38] [56]
The Lunder Conservation Center, which opened in July 2006, [59] is the first art conservation facility that allows the public permanent behind-the-scenes views of preservation work. [59] Conservation staff are visible to the public through floor-to-ceiling glass walls that allow visitors to see firsthand all the techniques which conservators use to examine, treat, and preserve artworks. [60] [59] [61] The Lunder Center has five conservation laboratories and studios equipped to treat paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculptures, folk art objects, contemporary crafts, decorative arts, and frames. [60] [59] The Center uses various specialized and esoteric tools, such as hygrothermographs, to maintain optimal temperature and humidity to preserve works of art. Staff from both the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery work in the Lunder Center. [59]
The museum has put on hundreds of exhibitions since its founding. Many exhibitions are groundbreaking and promote new scholarship within the field of American art.
What follows is a brief list of selected, and more recent, examples: [62]
The museum has maintained a traveling exhibition program since 1951. During the 2000s renovation, a "series of exhibitions of more than 1,000 major artworks from American Art's permanent collection traveled to 105 venues across the United States," which were "seen by more than 2.5 million visitors". Since 2006, thirteen exhibitions have toured to more than 30 cities. [78]
SAAM provides electronic resources to schools and the public as part of education programs. An example is Artful Connections, which gives real-time video conference tours of American Art. In addition, the museum offers the Summer Institutes: Teaching the Humanities through Art, week-long professional development workshops that introduce educators to methods for incorporating American art and technology into their humanities curricula. [79]
American Art has seven online research databases, which has more than 500,000 records of artworks in public and private collections worldwide, including the Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture. Numerous researchers and millions of virtual visitors per year use these databases. Also, American Art and Heritage Preservation work together in a joint project, Save Outdoor Sculpture, "dedicated to the documentation and preservation of outdoor sculpture". The museum produces a peer-reviewed periodical, American Art (started in 1987), for new scholarship. Since 1993, American Art has been had an online presence. It has one of the earliest museum websites when, in 1995, it launched its own website. EyeLevel, the first blog at the Smithsonian Institution, was started in 2005 and, as of 2013, the blog "has approximately 12,000 readers each month". [80]
In 2006, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi designed the conservators' denim work aprons. [61] [81] [82]
In 2008, the American Art Museum hosted an alternate reality game, called Ghosts of a Chance, which was created by City Mystery. The game allowed patrons "a new way of engaging with the collection" in the Luce Foundation Center. The game ran for six weeks and attracted more than 6,000 participants. [56]
The Smithsonian Institution, or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums, education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge." Founded on August 10, 1846, it operates as a trust instrumentality and is not formally a part of any of the three branches of the federal government. The institution is named after its founding donor, British scientist James Smithson. It was originally organized as the United States National Museum, but that name ceased to exist administratively in 1967.
An art museum or art gallery is a building or space for the display of art, usually from the museum's own collection. It might be in public or private ownership, be accessible to all, or have restrictions in place. Although primarily concerned with visual art, art museums are often used as a venue for other cultural exchanges and artistic activities, such as lectures, jewelry, performance arts, music concerts, or poetry readings. Art museums also frequently host themed temporary exhibitions, which often include items on loan from other collections.
The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery is an art museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., focusing on Asian art. The Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art together form the National Museum of Asian Art in the United States. The Freer and Sackler galleries house the largest Asian art research library in the country.
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum at the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New York City, along the Upper East Side's Museum Mile. It is one of 19 Smithsonian Institution museums and one of three Smithsonian facilities located in New York City, along with the National Museum of the American Indian's George Gustav Heye Center in Bowling Green and the Archives of American Art New York Research Center in the Flatiron District. Unlike other Smithsonian museums, Cooper Hewitt charges an admissions fee. It is the only museum in the United States devoted to historical and contemporary design. Its collections and exhibitions explore design aesthetic and creativity from throughout the United States' history.
The Freer Gallery of Art is an art museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. focusing on Asian art. The Freer and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery together form the National Museum of Asian Art in the United States. The Freer and Sackler galleries house the largest Asian art research library in the country and contain art from East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Islamic world, the ancient Near East, and ancient Egypt, as well as a significant collection of American art.
The National Museum of African Art is the Smithsonian Institution's African art museum, located on the National Mall of the United States capital. Its collections include 9,000 works of traditional and contemporary African art from both Sub-Saharan and North Africa, 300,000 photographs, and 50,000 library volumes. It was the first institution dedicated to African art in the United States and remains the largest collection. The Washington Post called the museum a mainstay in the international art world and the main venue for contemporary African art in the United States.
The Renwick Gallery is a branch of the Smithsonian American Art Museum located in Washington, D.C. that displays American craft and decorative arts from the 19th to 21st century. The gallery is housed in a National Historic Landmark building that was opened in 1859 on Pennsylvania Avenue and originally housed the Corcoran Gallery of Art. When it was built in 1859, it was called "the American Louvre", and is now named for its architect James Renwick Jr.
The Old Patent Office Building is a historic building in Washington, D.C. that covers an entire city block between F and G Streets and 7th and 9th Streets NW in the Penn Quarter section of Chinatown. Built 1836–1867 in the Greek Revival style, the building first served as one of the earliest U.S. Patent Office buildings.
Mary Lee Hu is an American artist, goldsmith, and college educator, known for using textile techniques to create intricate woven wire jewelry.
Mark Lindquist is an American sculptor in wood, artist, author, and photographer. Lindquist is a major figure in the redirection and resurgence of woodturning in the United States beginning in the early 1970s. His communication of his ideas through teaching, writing, and exhibiting, has resulted in many of his pioneering aesthetics and techniques becoming common practice. In the exhibition catalog for a 1995 retrospective of Lindquist's works at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, his contributions to woodturning and wood sculpture are described as "so profound and far-reaching that they have reconstituted the field". He has often been credited with being the first turner to synthesize the disparate and diverse influences of the craft field with that of the fine arts world.
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives is an institutional archives and library system comprising 21 branch libraries serving the various Smithsonian Institution museums and research centers. The Libraries and Archives serve Smithsonian Institution staff as well as the scholarly community and general public with information and reference support. Its collections number nearly 3 million volumes including 50,000 rare books and manuscripts.
Dan Owen Dailey is an American artist and educator, known for his sculpture. With the support of a team of artists and crafts people, he creates sculptures and functional objects in glass and metal. He has taught at many glass programs and is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts College of Art, where he founded the glass program.
The Archives of American Art is the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 20 million items of original material are housed in the Archives' research centers in Washington, D.C., and New York City.
The Colby College Museum of Art is an art museum on the campus of Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Founded in 1959 and now comprising five wings, nearly 8,000 works and more than 38,000 square feet of exhibition space, the Colby College Museum of Art has built a collection that specializes in American and contemporary art with additional, select collections of Chinese antiquities and European paintings and works on paper. The museum serves as a teaching resource for Colby College and is a major cultural destination for the residents of Maine and visitors to the state.
Tom Joyce is a sculptor and MacArthur Fellow known for his work in forged steel and cast iron. Using skills and technology acquired through early training as a blacksmith, Joyce addresses the environmental, political, and social implications of using iron in his work. Exhibited internationally since the 1980s, his work is included in 30-plus public collections in the U.S. and abroad. Joyce works in Santa Fe, New Mexico producing sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs, and videos that reference themes of iron in the human body, iron in industry, and iron in the natural world.
Kay Sekimachi is an American fiber artist and weaver, best known for her three-dimensional woven monofilament hangings as well as her intricate baskets and bowls.
Conservation and restoration at the Smithsonian Institution deals with the care of the 138 million artifacts located in the collections of Smithsonian Institution. Work is conducted by one research center, the Museum Conservation Institute (MCI), and by conservators at the Smithsonian's museums, galleries, zoo. Smithsonian conservators provide myriad services to their units, including exhibit preparation of the museum collection and loan objects, advising on object care, training for future generations of conservationists, engaging in routine preventive care on a daily basis, conducting research projects related to the collections, and examining objects for evidence of manufacturing techniques and previous restorations All conservation labs collectively further the mission of the Smithsonian Institution, "the increase and diffusion of knowledge." Founded in 1846 the Smithsonian is the world's largest museum and research complex, consisting of 19 museums and galleries, the National Zoological Park, and nine research facilities.
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.
Lloyd Eldred Herman (1936-2023) was an American arts administrator, curator, writer, museum planner and acknowledged expert on contemporary craft. He was known for being the founding Director of the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., from 1971 to 1986.
Also included are... copies of drawings for the proposed National Gallery of Art (never constructed) by Charles A. Platt, 1924....
Rep. Thompson introduced a bill providing that the building be transferred to the Smithsonian for its art collection and for a National Portrait Gallery. This bill became law on March 28.– via ProQuest (subscription required)