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Tag: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery Library

Exploring Our Collections with “Bill T. Jones”

Salima Appiah-Duffell
May 3, 2018
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Exploring Our Collections with “Bill T. Jones”

This year is Smithsonian Libraries is celebrating 50 years as  a unified system. While each museum has (at least) one library dedicated research material on items related to the museum’s collection; as a branch system, The Libraries’ help researchers explore any part of a question that interests them. This sounds pretty straightforward, but what does it look like in real life? To find out, this post explore how one item from a museum’s collection can be researched across several of our library branches. Our example:  Bill T. Jones (1985),  a  portrait of the choreographer by Robert Mapplethorpe. This work is on view in the Recent Acquisitions exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

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Check It Out with Smithsonian Libraries

Sara Cardello
February 6, 2018
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Check It Out is a collaborative program between the Smithsonian Libraries and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s Education Departments. The program provides kits to families with young children that they can “check out” during their visits in the galleries. There are three different bags, each one anchored by a children’s book, simple hands-on materials, and a suggested artwork to visit. Carpet squares are left in front of each artwork to encourage sitting, careful looking, and really investing in the materials provided.

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Ian Cheng: Live Simulation

Erin Rushing
March 14, 2016
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Ian Cheng
Photograph of Ian Cheng from Natt & Dag.

This post was written by Tim Cannon, intern in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library.

Suspended Animation, which opened on February 10 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, features work by six contemporary artists working with digitally generated images. Among these artists is Ian Cheng, a New York-based artist who worked for George Lucas’ visual effects company, Industrial Light and Magic, before earning an MFA at Columbia University. His work is typically based on computer simulations, often lacking a fixed duration or narrative, so that the action unfolds more or less spontaneously, according to an algorithm rather than a plan. Cheng’s live simulation (his term for the programs he makes) Emissary in the Squat of the Gods, will appear in the exhibition.

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Art and Artist Files Reveal Surrealist Jewels Designed by Salvador Dalí

Sofia Silva
February 5, 2016
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The brilliant sparkle of a diamond, the saturated blood-red of a ruby, and the rich deep blue of a sapphire become the building blocks of one of Salvador Dalí’s lesser known artistic enterprises: jewelry design. The renowned Catalonian artist, most famous for his mind-bending Surrealist paintings of dream worlds and for his eccentricity as a self-proclaimed “genius,” began to design his jewelry collection in 1941 and continued the artistic project until 1970.

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1970s Face-off: Portrait Exchange by Jamie Wyeth and Andy Warhol

Sofia Silva
December 14, 2015
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1970s Face-off: Portrait Exchange by Jamie Wyeth and Andy Warhol

This post was written by Sofia Silva, Katzenberger Intern at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library and American Art & Portrait Gallery Library as part of a series exploring the Art & Artists Files at the Smithsonian Libraries.

 

Cover of the invitation to the 1976 exhibition "Andy Warhol and Jamie Wyeth Portraits of Each Other" at the Coe Kerr Gallery-- Hirshhorn
Cover of the invitation to the 1976 exhibition “Andy Warhol and Jamie Wyeth Portraits of Each Other” at the Coe Kerr Gallery– Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library.

 

Though contemporaries, the artists James Browning Wyeth and Andy Warhol could not be more diametrically opposed. James, more commonly known as Jamie, is a third-generation member of the famed Wyeth family, who are celebrated as central figures in the revival of realism in American art (his father is Andrew Wyeth, painter of the American classic Christina’s World and his grandfather, N.C. Wyeth is acclaimed painter of vast landscapes and epic narratives of early Americana). Jamie continued this family tradition as a portraitist and landscape painter, whose naturalistic approach to painting produced highly detailed and visually complex work that captured life in rural Maine, Delaware and Pennsylvania.

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