The Smithsonian American Art Museum 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,while craft-focused exhibitions are shown in the Renwick Gallery.
Louis Lozowick was a Ukrainian-born American painter and printmaker. He is recognized as an Art Deco and Precisionist artist,and mainly produced streamline,urban-inspired monochromatic lithographs in a career that spanned 50 years.
Elizabeth Woodman was an American ceramic artist.
Renée Stout is an American sculptor and contemporary artist known for assemblage artworks dealing with her personal history and African-American heritage. Born in Kansas,raised in Pittsburgh,living in Washington,D.C.,and connected through her art to New Orleans,her art reflects this interest in African diasporic culture throughout the United States. Stout was the first American artist to exhibit in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art.
Walter "Chico" Hopps was an American museum director,gallerist,and curator of contemporary art. Hopps helped bring Los Angeles post-war artists to prominence during the 1960s,and later went on to redefine practices of curatorial installation internationally. He is known for contributing decisively to “the emergence of the museum as a place to show new art.”
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.
Eleanor Jones Harvey is a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Paul W. Faulkner was an American artist.
Joyce J. Scott is an African-American artist,sculptor,quilter,performance artist,installation artist,print-maker,lecturer and educator. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016,and a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019,Scott is best known for her figurative sculptures and jewelry using free form,off-loom beadweaving techniques,similar to a peyote stitch. Each piece is often constructed using thousands of glass seed beads or pony beads,and sometimes other found objects or materials such as glass,quilting and leather. In 2018,she was hailed for working in new medium —a mixture of soil,clay,straw,and cement —for a sculpture meant to disintegrate and return to the earth. Scott is influenced by a variety of diverse cultures,including Native American and African traditions,Mexican,Czech,and Russian beadwork,illustration and comic books,and pop culture.
Elizabeth "Betsy" Broun is an American art historian and curator. Broun served as the Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum from 1989 to 2016,and is the longest-serving female director in the history of the Smithsonian Institution.
John P. Jacob is an American curator. He grew up in Italy and Venezuela,graduated from the Collegiate School (1975) in New York City,and studied at the University of Chicago before earning a BA in human ecology from the College of the Atlantic (1981) and an MA in art history from Indiana University (1994).
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.
Stephanie Antoinette Franziska Stebich is a German-born American art historian and curator.
Dorothea Mierisch (1885–1977) was an American artist born in New York City in 1885,and she died in Hopewell,New Jersey in 1977.
Consuelo Jiménez Underwood is an American fiber artist,known for her pieces that focus on immigration issues. She is an indigenous Chicana currently based in Cupertino,California. As an artist she works with textiles in attempt to unify her American roots with her Mexican Indigenous ones,along with trying to convey the same for other multicultural people.
Maurie D. McInnis is an American art historian,currently serving as the 24th president of Yale University since July 2024. She previously served as the sixth president of Stony Brook University from 2020 to 2024.
Evelyn Carmen Ramos is the first woman and the first person of color to be the chief curatorial and conservation officer at the National Gallery of Art.
Lillian Wolock Elliott was an American fiber artist,and textile designer. She is known for her innovative basket craft.
Claudia E Zapata is a Queer Chicanx artist and curator known as one of the co-founders of the Puro Chingón Collective,which develops BIPOC zines and designer toys. In 2023,Zapata became the first associate curator of Latino Art at the Blanton Museum in Austin,Texas.
Jonathan P. Binstock is an American art historian,curator and museum administrator,and the director of The Phillips Collection in Washington,D.C.,since 2023. He previously served as director of the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester,New York,and as a curator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington,and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He also worked for Citibank's art finance &advisory division for several years as an art adviser. His primary curatorial and research focus is modern and contemporary art.
