News

On Thursday, January 31, Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough and Interim Director Liza Kirwin hosted a reception to officially open the new Archives of American Art New York Research Center at 300 Park Avenue South, Suite 300 in New York, NY. The festive evening included over 100 guests including trustees, patrons, Smithsonian cabinet members, and members of the media.

The Smithsonian's Archives of American Art presents an exhibition on the many ways artists experience museums. The exhibition opened Jan. 14 at the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery in the Smithsonian's Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture and will remain on view through May 16.

The Smithsonian's Archives of American Art presents "Henry Mosler's Civil War Diary," a digital exhibition at civilwardiary.aaa.si.edu launched in recognition of the sesquicentennial of Mosler's diary. Mosler (1841-1920) was a painter and illustrator who worked primarily in Ohio, Kentucky, New York City and Europe. Mosler began his career during the Civil War when he served as an artist correspondent for Harper's Weekly.

A special issue of the Archives of American Art Journal will publish several important new finds by scholar Laurette E. McCarthy.  The most significant is her identification and attribution of two seemingly lost installation photographs by Hagelstein Brothers, the official photographers of the Armory Show, which show in vivid detail the infamous Cubist and Matisse rooms.

Meredith A. Brown and Jennifer Stettler Parsons were awarded the Archives of American Art Graduate Research Essay Prize funded by the Dedalus Foundation, Inc. This prize, in its inaugural year, recognizes compelling original research using the resources of the Archives of American Art as primary evidence and celebrates scholarship that lends itself to innovative online presentations. The annual competition is open to anyone enrolled in a graduate program in art history, visual culture, American studies or related fields.

The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art has been awarded $100,000 by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation’s Digital Resources grant program to support a project to preserve, arrange and create Web-searchable online electronic finding aids for 10 archival collections that are central to provenance research for the history of art during World War II. 

This summer, the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art presents an exhibition based on the concept of six degrees of separation with New York artist Peggy Bacon as the central figure. “Six Degrees of Peggy Bacon” will highlight how the collections of the Archives of American Art represent the deep and diverse history of art in the United States and beyond. 

The Archives of American Art’s New York Research Center at 1285 Avenue of the Americas will close on May 4, 2012, and reopen at its new location at 300 Park Avenue South, Suite 300, in early 2013.

The Archives of American Art has contributed more than 1,350 digital images, representing nearly 1,000 documents, to the Marcel Breuer Digital Archive. 

The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art has elected Perry Amsellem, Linda Lichtenberg Kaplan, Bridget Moore and Martin O’Brien to its board of trustees. They will join the board’s membership including nearly 40 prominent members of the American art community.