Annie Leibovitz's State of the Union February 7, 2012

Annie Leibovitz, Plano, Illinois, 2011. © Annie Leibovitz, 2011

On Tuesday, January 24, a couple of hours before the President delivered his address to Congress, Annie Leibovitz presented her own state of the union to a sold-out audience at American Art's McEvoy Auditorium. Hers was a photographic pilgrimage--a meditation on the poetry of place--that took her across the country as well as overseas. Leibovitz, who spent her high school years in D.C., says that the first place on her "to visit" list was the Washington Monument. The rest as they say, is American history. Lincoln led her to Marian Anderson to Daniel Chester French, who designed the 16th president's memorial. Also on the journey, Georgia O'Keeffe, whose beautiful box of handmade pastels can still take your breath away, as well as Val Kill, the Hudson Valley home of Eleanor Roosevelt, and The Evergreens, the Amherst, Massachusetts home of Emily Dickinson's brother, Austin.

Leibovitz, who followed her introductory comments with a slideshow, presented images that included Emily Dickinson's fragile white dress, Elvis Presley's motorcycle and bullet-shot television (apparently he wasn't a fan of Robert Goulet; sorry Bob), Niagara Falls (an image so beautiful you feel you may go over at any minute), as well as Henry David Thoreau's wicker bed, Ansel Adams' darkroom, and a page from a journal belonging to Bronson Alcott, who poignantly traced his daughter Louisa May's hand in his right on the page. It, too, is one of those quiet moments that stuns you with its beauty, and may lead you to contemplate a list of your own: where would I stop on my own pilgrimage?

And so as not to disappoint fans of her commercial work for Vogue and Vanity Fair, Leibovitz drew the evening to a close with images of Joan Didion, artists John Currin and Rachel Feinstein, and a handful of Lady Gaga mostly dressed to the nines, except for one, where she's not very dressed at all. She's posed with crooner Tony Bennett and his expression is priceless as he deals with more Gaga than he probably expected.

With time for questions at the end, Leibovitz answered one from a woman in the audience, who, like Leibovitz, is a mother of three. She wanted to know how the woman on stage balanced work and home, to which Leibovitz gave her thoughtful reply, "You don't have to go out to take pictures...I always thought that you could do the seven wonders of the world in your room with a camera..stay close to home and photograph the people close to you."

The evening was a great opportunity to get to know a photographer whose work we've all admired for decades. And where else can you go from Emily Dickinson to Lady Gaga in sixty minutes flat?

Watch the webcast. Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage runs through May 20, 2012.

The Making of The Art of Video Games February 3, 2012

Fabrication is underway for the 20 "genre kiosks" for The Art of Video Games exhibition.

The Art of Video Games exhibition opens in less than two months (on March 16, 2012), so things are getting a little hectic around the museum! Early in January, the exhibits team did a round of testing for the 5 "playable" games that will be in the exhibition (Pac-Man, Super Mario Brothers, The Secret of Monkey Island, Myst, and Flower). The most challenging aspect of these games is that we are running them through original hardware and/or operating systems, including an authentic Pac-Man circuit board!

Fabrication is well underway for the 20 "genre kiosks" that will showcase 80 video games through screen captures and video footage. These are the 80 games that won the public vote in 2011. We were very excited to see how these were coming along! You can see more photos of the game testing and kiosk fabrication on Flickr. We'll continue to add images as we get closer to the opening, including photos of installation in the galleries.

Picture This: The Winners of the Renwick Postcard Contest February 1, 2012

Top: the winning postcard of our Renwick 40th Anniversary postcard contest by Becca Kallem. Bottom: Our runner-up entry is by Joanna Barnum.

American Art's Renwick Gallery is celebrating its 40th year—40 years of the best in American craft, decorative arts, exhibitions, and programs. To commemorate this milestone, we challenged our visitors to design a postcard to help us celebrate.

The Postcard Design Contest wrapped up on January 17, 2012. The staff of the Renwick Gallery met and reviewed the entries. There were many submissions and it was a tough choice. The group debated for a long while before deciding on a winner. Becca Kallem’s simple but beautiful watercolor of building’s façade was chosen. The winning postcard will be available for purchase in our Renwick Shop.

The Art of Video Games: Announcing GameFest January 26, 2012

Join us for the documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

To celebrate the opening of The Art of Video Games exhibition, we will be holding three jam-packed days of events and activities from Friday, March 16 through Sunday, March 18, 2012. The schedule kicks off on Friday with panel discussions that include industry pioneers such as Don Daglow and RJ Mical, as well as innovative contemporary game designers such as Kellee Santiago and Ken Levine. Following this is a keynote presentation by Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and often considered to be the father of electronic gaming (please note that this program is sold out). On Friday night, join us in our cool courtyard for a special screening of the original TRON, during which our cafe will remain open for drinks and snacks.

Saturday and Sunday will be filled with open play on historic and contemporary game consoles, craft activities, live action game play, and music. Saturday night brings you the documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and includes a special treat after the screening, when curator Chris Melissinos will host a discussion with the documentary stars Walter Day, Brian Kuh, Billy Mitchell, and Steve Sanders. For the full schedule of events during GameFest, please see our website! Note that all programs and activities are free, open to the public, and do not require registration, but will operate on a first-come first-served basis whenever space is limited.

Q and Art: Silhouettes January 24, 2012

This post is the first of an ongoing series on Eye Level: "Q and Art" and is the successor to our series "The Best of Ask Joan of Art." Begun in 1993, Ask Joan of Art was the longest-running arts-based electronic reference service in the country. We retired the service late last year but want to continue to bring you interesting questions and answers about art and artists from our archive.

Left: an unidentified artist's hollow-cut silhouette of Evelyn Byrd, center: M. A. Honeywell's cut-and-pasted silhouette Lady, right: George Catlin's painted silhouette Mr. Fred H. Robinson

Question: I heard that the term silhouette comes from the name of the 18th century French finance minister Etienne de Silhouette. What is the history of silhouettes in the United States?

Answer: Silhouettes were a popular art form in the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries because they were accurate, inexpensive, quick to make and easy to send to a friend or relative. Scholars believe Etienne de Silhouette’s name became connected with these black and white portraits because of the finance minister’s extreme cost-cutting. Referring to his penny-pinching efforts, affordable items were often labeled à la Silhouette. Earlier names for silhouettes included shades, profiles or shadow pictures. The more sophisticated sounding "silhouette" was popularized in the United States and England by European artists who wanted to make their portraits stand out from the shades that were already common.

The earliest known mention of a silhouette in America was in a 1769 letter from Harriott Pinckney: "Thos. Wollaston has summon'd me today, to put the finishing strokes to my shadow, which straightens me for time." By the end of the 18th century silhouettists had established studios in cities, and many traveling silhouettists offered their services to smaller towns. Artists distinguished themselves from the competition through advertisements in the local newspaper that promoted the artist's speed, accuracy and innovative technique. While some artists used only scissors and possibly paint to create their clients portraits, many others employed a mechanical device, known as a physiognotrace, to trace and simultaneously reduce the sitter's profile. Beginning in 1802, Charles Willson Peale placed a physiognotrace in his Philadelphia museum. Visitors could use the device themselves or pay Moses Williams, Peale's slave, to operate the physiognotrace for them. The device was an enormous success, and more than 8,500 silhouettes were cut in the first year. Williams made enough money from the service to buy his freedom.

As photography became more common in the mid 19th century, silhouettes fell out of fashion. Photographs shared and improved on many of the benefits of silhouettes. However, despite photography's triumph over the older art form, we still see the influence of these simple portraits in the decorative arts and the work of contemporary artists such as Kara Walker.

Silhouettes in the United States (and in the American Art Museum's collection) are divided into three main types: painted, hollow-cut (profile cut from the center of a sheet of light colored paper and placed over a dark ground), and cut-and-pasted (profile cut from black paper and pasted onto a white ground).

For more information on silhouettes, look for Emma Rutherford's and Lulu Guinness's book Silhouette: The Art of the Shadow.