David Levinthal’s Modern Romance Photographs

Viewing Film Noir Through a Different Lens

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Media - 2018.3.71 - SAAM-2018.3.71_1 - 133830 — David Levinthal, Untitled from the series Modern Romance, 1984, instant color print, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Shanti Boyle is an intern with SAAM’s Office of External Affairs and Digital Strategies.

Two out of the six series of images in the current exhibition, American Myth & Memory: David Levinthal Photographs, focus on the representation of women in the media, with a third, „Modern Romance,“ vying for a spot. „American Beauties“ and „Barbie“ blatantly highlight antiquated conceptions of attractiveness, ones perpetuated and memorialized by media. On the other hand, „Modern Romance“ offers a blanket statement on film noir itself by containing more general subjects, such as a stadium or a street corner.

… read on

Oktober 20th, 2019 · Tags: David Levinthal · Discussion · Exhibition · Photography · SAAM

On Harriet Whitney Frishmuth’s The Vine

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Harriet Whitney Frishmuth, The Vine, 1923, bronze, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Cunniffe, 2014.60

A recent Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art at SAAM, Clarisse Fava-Piz is completing her dissertation, ‘Sculpting Beyond Borders: Local Identity and Transnational Mobility in the Age of Rodin,’ at the University of Pittsburgh. This blog post is based on a talk Fava-Piz gave at SAAM as part of the Art Bites series.

… read on

Oktober 12th, 2019 · Tags: Bronze · Discussion · SAAM · Sculpture

Danilo Milovanović: acts of resistance to the alienation of public space

Régine Debatty

As promised earlier this week, here’s a few notes about Danilo Milovanović, a super talented artist whose work i discovered at the Fotopub, the festival of young art and “unconventional curatorial gestures” which took place in early August in Novo Mesto, Slovenia.