John Anderson

It’s a simple question: who painted the Obamas’ official White House portraits?
We know what you’re thinking: Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald painted the wildly popular portraits of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. They went on display at the National Portrait Gallery in 2018, and are currently on a national tour.
But we’re talking about the official White House portraits. Since the Kennedy Administration, the White House Historical Association has commissioned them for the...

A DC-area non-profit transforms the stories of healthcare workers into poetry.

Exhibition catalog for the memorial retrospective exhibition, Yuri Schwebler: The Spiritual Plane, a conceptual artist who worked in DC from 1970–1980, and who took his life in 1990.

The exhibition, slated for summer 2020, was a part of the Alper Initiative for Washington Art, American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, DC.

The link will download the PDF.

This past Friday, Arlington County marked the 30th anniversary of Nancy Holt's Dark Star Park, the first since the artist's death from leukemia in February. There was plenty of pomp, with remarks from Arlington County Board Chairman Jay Fisette and Virginia Congressman Jim Moran, but there was very little circumstance: The sun did not shine; it was too dark to play. While the features of Dark Star Park—spheres, reflecting pools, poles, trees—were visible, there were no shadows from the poles ...

Franz Jantzen doesn’t need to explain what the Library of Congress has lost, now that its consumers no longer have the option of ordering silver gelatin reproductions of images in its collection. He’d rather show you.
He points me toward me a high-resolution digital print of Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” one of the most iconic images of the Great Depression. Look at the range of grays, and you can see subtle differences in the textures of the children’s hair and clothes, and in the worri...

An obituary and remembrance of DC photographer, Mark Power, who started the photography program at the Corcoran College of Art in the 1970s, and influenced photographers Sally Mann and Nancy Rexroth.

In 2002, when the Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired Nam June Paik’s "Electronic Superhighway,” a neon-outlined wall of televisions that forms a map of the United States, it didn't arrive in a truck or a van. Instead, it arrived in a box, in pieces: some electronics, videos, broken neon, and most surprisingly, no televisions.
Turns out, there is more to displaying a Paik than plugging it in and turning it on.
“One thing about [Paik] is that he never curated his career,” says Betsy Broun...

Standing behind the 1986 video sculpture Family of Robot: Hi-Tech Baby, Associate curator Michael Mansfield turns it on from his smartphone. It’s one of the robots in the exhibition “Nam June Paik: Global Visionary,” open through Aug. 11 at Washington’s Smithsonian American Art Museum. The museum manages electronic artworks with software on its central server. After logging into the server with a virtual network computing (VNC) app on his phone, Mansfield can operate and monitor every work on...

[caption id="attachment_44574" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Nam June Paik's "Electronic Superhighway""]
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Given the recent opening of an exhibition of Nam June Paik's work at the National Gallery of Art, as well as the long-term commitment to media art the Smithsonian American Art Museum has made its Watch This! exhibition, I thought now would be a good time to talk with SAAM's senior curator for media arts, John G. Hanhardt, about the Nam June Paik archives. SAAM acquired ...

When artists Pablo Garcia and Golan Levin launched their latest Kickstarter project on May 7, aiming to raise money to produce an updated camera lucida, the $30 NeoLucida, their big hope was to attract 500 backers before June.
By midmorning on the next day they were fully funded, and they sold out their available stock of 2,500 just 16 hours after their launch. And there was demand for more.
The camera lucida is an optical device that assists artists in drawing by projecting onto a drawing su...

Here’s a fun game: Ask your friends to name their favorite Renaissance painters. Friends without artistic backgrounds would probably list the names of Ninja Turtles. Some might include Sandro Botticelli, Dürer, or Bosch. Artists may add Titian, Jan van Eyck, Giotto, or Giovanni Bellini.
A name that would likely make none of those lists is Piero di Cosimo, currently the subject of a monographic retrospective at the National Gallery of Art. Considering that it’s been nearly 500 years since Pier...