Smithsonian American Art Museum

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. The museum has more than 7,000 artists represented in the collection. Most exhibitions take place 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.

History

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has had many names over the years—Smithsonian Art Collection, National Gallery of Art (not to be confused with the current National Gallery of Art), National Collection of Fine Arts, and National Museum of American Art.  The museum adopted its current name in October 2000.

The collection, which was begun in 1829, was first on display in the original Smithsonian Building, now nicknamed the "Castle". The collection grew as the Smithsonian buildings grew, and the collection was housed in one or more Smithsonian buildings on the National Mall.  By the 1920s, 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".  In 1924, architect Charles A. Platt – who designed the 1918 Freer Gallery for the Smithsonian – drew up preliminary plans for a National Gallery of Art to be built on the block next to the Natural History Museum.  However, this building was never constructed.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum first opened to the public in its current location in 1968 when the Smithsonian renovated the Old Patent Office Building in order to display its collection of fine art. American Art's main building, the Old Patent Office Building, is a National Historic Landmark located in Washington, D.C.'s downtown cultural district. An example of Greek Revival architecture, it was designed by architects Robert Mills and Thomas U. Walter.

During the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institution worked on restoring the building.

The Smithsonian completed another renovation of the building in July 1, 2006.  The 2000-2006 renovation restored many of the building’s exceptional architectural features: restoring the porticos modeled after the Parthenon in Athens, a curving double staircase, colonnades, vaulted galleries, large windows, and skylights as long as a city block.  During the renovation, the Lunder Conservation Center, the Luce Foundation Center for American Art, Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium, and the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard were added to the building.

In 2008, the American Alliance of Museums awarded reaccreditation to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Affiliated museums

National Portrait Gallery

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.

Renwick Gallery

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.  The building originally housed the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art.  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.

Features and programs

Collections

Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum has a broad variety of American art, with more than 7,000 artists represented, 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, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Singer Sargent, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Albert Bierstadt, Edmonia Lewis, Thomas Moran, James Gill, Edward Hopper, John William "Uncle Jack" Dey, Karen LaMonte and Winslow Homer.

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."

Galleries and public spaces

The American Art's main building contains expanded permanent-collection galleries and public spaces.  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.  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".

The Luce Foundation Center for American Art

The Luce Foundation Center, which opened in July 2000, is the first visible art storage and study center in Washington, D.C. and the fourth center to bear the Luce Family name.  It has 20,400 square feet on the third and fourth floors of American Art Museum.

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.  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.  The Luce Foundation Center features paintings densely hung on screens; sculptures; crafts and objects by folk and self-taught artists arranged on shelves.  Large-scale sculptures are installed on the first floor.  The Center has John Gellatly’s European collection of decorative arts.

Lunder Conservation Center

The Lunder Conservation Center, which opened in July 2000, is the first art conservation facility that allows the public permanent behind-the-scenes views of preservation work.  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.  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.  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.

Selected exhibitions

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:

Ginny Ruffner: Reforestation of the Imagination (2019-2020)

Michael Sherrill Retrospective (2019-2020)

American Myth & Memory: David Levinthal Photographs (2019-2019)

Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975 (2019-2019)

Disrupting Craft: Renwick Invitational 2018 (2018-2019)

Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor (2018-2019)

Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen (2018-2019)

Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs (2018-2019)

No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man (2018-2019)

Do Ho Suh: Almost Home (2018)

Tamayo: The New York Years (2017-2018)

Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (2017-2018)

Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) (2017-2018)

Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography (2017)

June Schwarcz: Invention and Variation (2017)

Gene Davis: Hot Beat (2016-2017)

Isamu Noguchi, Archaic/Modern (2016-2017)

Harlem Heroes: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten (2016-2017)

Visions and Revisions: Renwick Invitational 2016 (2016)

Artworks by African Americans from the Collection (2016)

The Art of Romaine Brooks (2016)

Ralph Fasanella: Lest We Forget (2014)

Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (2014)

Pop Art Prints (2014)

Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art (2013)

Landscapes In Passing: Photographs by Steve Fitch, Robbert Flick, and Elaine Mayes (2013)

A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2013)

Nam June Paik: Global Visionary (2012)

The Civil War and American Art (2012)

40 under 40: Craft Futures (2012)

African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond (2012)

The Art of Video Games (2012)

Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage (2011)

Multiplicity (2011)

The Great American Hall of Wonders (2011)

Something of Splendor: Decorative Arts from the White House (2011)

Alexis Rockman - A Fable for Tomorrow (2010)

The West As America (1991)

Outreach

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.

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.

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".

In popular culture

President Abraham Lincoln held his inaugural ball in the gallery currently called the Lincoln Gallery.

In 2006, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi designed the conservators' denim work aprons.

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.