Coordinates: 38°53′49″N 77°01′22″W / 38.897°N 77.0226889°W / 38.897; -77.0226889

Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum shares the Reynolds Center with the National Portrait Gallery. This view taken from G Street NW in Washington DC.
Location in Washington, D.C.
Established	1829[1]
Location	8th & F Streets NW, Washington, D.C.
Type	Art museum, Design/Textile Museum, Heritage Museum[2]
Visitor figures	1,142,600 (2008)[3]
Director	Elizabeth Broun[4]
Curator	Eleanor Jones Harvey[4]
Public transit access	Gallery Place (Washington Metro)
Website	americanart.si.edu

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is a museum in Washington, D.C. with an extensive collection of American art.

Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum has a broad variety of American art that covers all regions and art movements found in the United States. Among the significant artists represented in its collection are Nam June Paik, Jenny Holzer, David Hockney, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Singer Sargent, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Albert Bierstadt, Edmonia Lewis, Thomas Moran, James Gill, Edward Hopper, Karen LaMonte^[5] and Winslow Homer.^[3]

The museum has two innovative public spaces, the Luce Foundation Center for American Art and the Lunder Conservation Center. The Luce Foundation Center is the first visible art storage and study center in Washington, D.C. It presents more than 3,300 objects in 64 secure glass cases, which quadruples the number of artworks from the permanent collection on public view. The Luce Foundation Center features paintings densely hung on screens, sculptures, crafts and folk art objects arranged on shelves, and miniatures and medals in drawers that open. Large-scale sculptures are installed on the first floor. Interactive computer kiosks provide the public with information about every object on display, including a discussion of each artwork, artist biographies, audio interviews, video clips and still images.^[3]

Inside the Smithsonian American Art Museum, on re-opening weekend in July 2006

The Lunder Conservation Center is the first art conservation facility that allows the public permanent behind-the-scenes views of preservation work. Conservation staff are visible to the public through floor-to-ceiling glass walls that allow visitors to see firsthand all the techniques which conservators use to examine, treat and preserve artworks. The Lunder Center has five state-of-the-art laboratories and studios equipped to treat paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculptures, folk art objects, contemporary crafts, decorative arts and frames. Staff from both the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery work in the Lunder Center.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum first opened to the public in its current location in 1968 when the Smithsonian renovated the Old Patent Office Building in order to display its collection of fine art. Previously the collection, which was begun in 1829, was on display in a Smithsonian building on the National Mall.^[3] The Smithsonian American Art Museum has had many names over the years—Smithsonian Art Collection, National Gallery of Art, National Collection of Fine Arts, and National Museum of American Art. The museum adopted its current name in October 2000.

The Smithsonian completed another renovation of the building in July 2006. Washington D.C.-based Hartman-Cox Architects oversaw the project, which restored many of the building’s exceptional architectural features, such as the porticos, a curving double staircase, colonnades, vaulted galleries, large windows, and skylights as long as a city block. On November 18, 2007 the central courtyard opened with a new, curved glass canopy designed by the architectural firm Foster + Partners.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum shares its historic building with the National Portrait Gallery, another Smithsonian museum. Although the two museums' names have not changed, they are collectively known as the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture.

Renwick Gallery[link]

The Renwick Gallery is located on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Also under the auspices of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Renwick Gallery is a smaller, historic building on Pennsylvania Avenue across the street from the White House. The building originally housed the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In addition to displaying a large collection of American contemporary craft, several hundred paintings from the museum’s permanent collection — hung salon style: one-atop-another and side-by-side — are featured in special installations in the Grand Salon.

Designed by noted architect James Renwick, Jr., the Second Empire-style building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1971.^[6]

Exhibitions[link]

• The West As America

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Smithsonian American Art Museum

• Smithsonian American Art Museum
• Luce Foundation Center
• Lunder Conservation Center
• "Smithsonian American Art Museum", Lee Rosenbaum, The Wall Street Journal, August 29, 2006

This article uses bare URLs for citations. Please consider adding full citations so that the article remains verifiable. Several templates and the Reflinks tool are available to assist in formatting. (Reflinks documentation) (November 2011)

The Louvre in Paris, France, is one of the world's largest museums and it is the most visited art museum in the world.

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

An art gallery or art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art. Museums can be public or private, but what distinguishes a museum is the ownership of a collection. Paintings are the most commonly displayed art objects; however, sculpture, decorative arts, furniture, textiles, costume, drawings, pastels, watercolors, collages, prints, artists' books, photographs, and installation art are also regularly shown.^[1] Although primarily concerned with providing a space to show works of visual art, art galleries are sometimes used to host other artistic activities, such as performance art, music concerts, or poetry readings.

Types of galleries[link]

The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, Willem van Haecht, 1628. A private picture gallery as an early precursor of the modern museum.

The term is used for both public galleries, which are non-profit or publicly owned museums that display selected collections of art. On the other hand private galleries refers to the commercial enterprises for the sale of art. However, both types of gallery may host traveling exhibits or temporary exhibitions including art borrowed from elsewhere.

Galleries in museums[link]

The rooms in museums where art is displayed for the public are often referred to as galleries as well, with a room dedicated to Ancient Egyptian art often being called the Egyptian Gallery, for example.

Contemporary art gallery[link]

The term contemporary art gallery refers usually to a privately owned for-profit commercial gallery. These galleries are often found clustered together in large urban centers. Smaller cities are usually home to at least one gallery, but they may also be found in towns or villages, and remote areas where artists congregate, e.g. the Taos art colony and St Ives, Cornwall.

Contemporary art galleries are usually open to the general public without charge; however, some are semi-private. They usually profit by taking a portion of art sales; from 25% to 50% is typical. There are also many non-profit or collective galleries. Some galleries in cities like Tokyo charge the artists a flat rate per day, though this is considered distasteful in some international art markets. Galleries often hang solo shows. Curators often create group shows that say something about a certain theme, trend in art, or group of associated artists. Galleries sometimes choose to represent artists exclusively, giving them the opportunity to show regularly.

A gallery's definition can also include the artist cooperative or artist-run space, which often (in North America and Western Europe) operates as a space with a more democratic mission and selection process. Such galleries typically have a board of directors and a volunteer or paid support staff that select and curate shows by committee, or some kind of similar process to choose art that typically lacks commercial ends.

Vanity galleries[link]

A vanity gallery is an art gallery that charges fees from artists in order to show their work, much like a vanity press does for authors. The shows are not legitimately curated and will frequently or usually include as many artists as possible. Most art professionals are able to identify them on an artist's resume.^[2]

Visual art not shown in a gallery[link]

Works on paper, such as drawings, pastels, watercolors, prints, and photographs are typically not permanently displayed for conservation reasons. Instead, public access to these materials is provided by a dedicated print study room located within the museum. Murals generally remain where they have been painted, although many have been removed to galleries. Various forms of 20th century art, such as land art and performance art, also usually exist outside a gallery. Photographic records of these kinds of art are often shown in galleries, however. Most museum and large art galleries own more works than they have room to display. The rest are held in reserve collections, on or off-site.

Similar to an art gallery is the sculpture garden (or sculpture park), which presents sculpture in an outdoor space. Sculpture installation has grown in popularity, whereby temporary sculptures are installed in open spaces during events like festivals.

Architecture[link]

The architectural form of the art gallery was established by Sir John Soane with his design for the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1817. This established the gallery as a series of interconnected rooms with largely uninterrupted wall spaces for hanging pictures and indirect lighting from skylights or roof lanterns.

The late 19th century saw a boom in the building of public art galleries in Europe and America, becoming an essential cultural feature of larger cities. More art galleries rose up alongside museums and public libraries as part of the municipal drive for literacy and public education.

In the middle and late 20th century earlier architectural styles employed for art museums (such as the Beaux-Arts style of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City or the Gothic and Renaissance Revival architecture of Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum) were increasingly replaced with more modern styles, such as Deconstructivism. Examples of this trend include the Guggenheim Museum in New York City by Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Centre Pompidou-Metz by Shigeru Ban, and Mario Botta's redesign of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Some critics argue that these galleries are self-defeating, in that their dramatic interior spaces distract the eye from the paintings they are supposed to exhibit.

Cultural aspects[link]

Many art museums throughout history have been designed with a cultural purpose or been subject to political intervention. In particular National Art Galleries have been thought to incite feelings of nationalism. This has occurred in both democratic and non-democratic countries, although authoritarian regimes have historically exercised more control over administration of art museums. Ludwig Justi was for example dismissed as director of The Alte Nationalgalerie (Old National Gallery) in Berlin in 1933 by the new Nazi authorities for not being politically suitable.^[3]

Since the 1970s a number of political theorists and social commentators have pointed to the political implications of art museums and social relations. Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, argued that in spite the apparent freedom of choice in the arts, people's artistic preferences (such as classical music, rock, traditional music) strongly tie in with their social position. So called Cultural capital is a major factor in social mobility (for example, getting a higher-paid, higher-status job). The argument states that certain art museums are aimed at perpetuating aristocratic and upper class ideals of taste and excludes segments of society without the social opportunities to develop such interest. The fine arts thus perpetuate social inequality by creating divisions between different social groups. This argument also ties in with the Marxist theory of mystification and elite culture.^[4]

Furthermore, certain art gallerias, such as the National Gallery in London and the Louvre in Paris are situated in buildings of considerable emotional impact. The Louvre in Paris is for instance located in the former Royal Castle of the ancient regime, and is thus clearly designed with a political agenda. It has been argued that such buildings create feelings of subjugation and adds to the mystification of fine arts.^[5]

Notable art museums[link]

Online museums[link]

Museums with major web presences[link]

Most art museums have only limited online collections, but a few museums, as well as some libraries and government agencies, have developed substantial online catalogues. Museums, libraries and government agencies with substantial online collections of prints, photographs, and other works on paper include:

• Library of Congress, prints (C19 on) and photographs collection (several million entries).^[6]

• The British Museum has 1,969,197 objects available online, of which 606,348 have one or more image (as at August 2011).^[7]

Museums, libraries and government agencies with substantial online collections with more focus on paintings and sculpture include:

• Boston Museum of Fine Arts, with over 330,000 works, most with images. Good for prints.[1]
• Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, with over 85,000 works
• Harvard Art Museums, with over 81,000 works, about half of which have very low resolution images.^[8]
• Louvre, with over 80,000 works in various databases, with a large number of images, as well as another 140,000 drawings.^[9]
• National Gallery of Art, with over 108,000 works catalogued, though with only 6,000 images.^[10]
• (French) The Mona Lisa Database of French Museums — Joconde *(from the French Ministry of Culture)

Online art collections[link]

There are a number of online art catalogues and galleries that have been developed independently of the support of any individual museum. Many of these are attempts to develop galleries of artwork that are encyclopedic or historical in focus, while others are commercial efforts to sell the work of contemporary artists.

A limited number of such sites have independent importance in the art world. The large auction houses, such as Sotheby's and Christie's maintain large online databases of art which they have auctioned or are auctioning. Bridgeman Art Library serves as a central source of reproductions of artwork, with access limited to museums, art dealers and other professionals or professional organizations.

Folksonomy[link]

There are also online galleries that have been developed by a collaboration of museums and galleries that are more interested with the categorization of art. They are interested in the potential use of folksonomy within museums and the requirements for post-processing of terms that have been gathered, both to test their utility and to deploy them in useful ways.

The steve.museum is one example of a site that is experimenting with this collaborative philosophy. The participating institutions include the Guggenheim Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

See also[link]

• Art exhibition
• Artist cooperative
• Artist-run initiative
• Artist-run space
• Arts centre
• Black cube art museum
• Contemporary art gallery
• List of most visited art museums in the world
• List of notable museums and galleries
• National Gallery (disambiguation)
• Vanity gallery
• Virtual museum

References[link]

Karen LaMonte
Karen LaMonte with Vestige
Born	(1967-12-14) December 14, 1967 (age 44) New York, New York, USA
Nationality	American
Field	Sculpture, Contemporary Art.
Training	Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Website	www.karenlamonte.com

Karen LaMonte (born December 14, 1967) is an American artist known for her life-size sculptures in ceramic, bronze and cast glass as well as her large scale monotype prints.

Background[link]

LaMonte grew up in Manhattan, New York, NY. In 1990, she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with a Bachelor in Fine Arts with Honors. Immediately after college, she was awarded a fellowship at the Creative Glass Center of America, in Millville, NJ. Following that, she moved to Brooklyn, NY, and worked at UrbanGlass, a not-for-profit public access glass studio. During this period, she pursued artwork in blown and cast glass, which were exhibited at fine art galleries.

In 1995, LaMonte met Steven Polaner. whom she later married. In 1998, they moved to the Czech Republic, where LaMonte was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue the use of large-scale cast glass in her artwork.^[1]

Artwork[link]

During her Fullbright year, LaMonte began working at Zdenek Lhotsky's Pelechov glass casting studio in Železný Brod in Eastern Bohemia - most famously associated with Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová, an artistic team often credited with the first studio glass sculptures. While here, she developed Vestige, a cast glass life-size sculpture of a dress, which took one year to complete and required the development of special technologies, including the introduction of the lost wax technique to Czech glass casting studios.^[2] Vestige was to become a seminal artwork, the beginning of an important body of work with far reaching influence on the field of contemporary art and glass.

Karen LaMonte's exhibition profile, which includes the Czech Museum of Fine Art in Prague, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA, and the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA, as well as her inclusion in the permanent collections of museums such as The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Renwick Gallery, Washington DC, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, the Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris, France, and The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra marks her as a major contemporary artist.

Her art deals largely with the central themes of beauty and loss, exploring the fragility of the human condition through a sartorial lens.

Her work has been critically acclaimed and written about by art critics such as Arthur Danto. In his 2005 essay The Poetry of Meaning and Loss: The Glass Dresses of Karen LaMonte, Danto wrote about Vestige:^[3]

"The dress belonged to a moment when the wearer was, to use an expression of Proust’s, en fleur. The dress belonged to a certain moment of history, which it preserves—it shows how women dressed for certain occasions at a certain moment. The wearer will have aged. She looked like that then, but, if she is still alive, it is certain she will not look that way now. There is a double melancholy—the melancholy of fashion, and the melancholy of bodily change, from nubility to decrepitude. The breasts have fallen, the waist thickened, the skin has lost it transparency and luminescence. The poignancy of LaMonte’s dresses is a product of two modes of change in which we participate as human beings, composed, as we are, of flesh and meaning. Their poetry is the poetry of beauty and loss."

LaMonte's newest body of work draws inspiration from Japan, exploring the same themes through a different cultural lens.

Awards[link]

• Corning Museum of Glass/Kohler Arts Center, Joint Artist-in-Residence Program, 2009
• Jutta Cuny Franz Memorial Award, Laureate, 2007
• Japan-United States Friendship Commission, NEA . Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship Program, 2006
• The Virginia A. Groot Foundation, Recognition Award, 2005
• UrbanGlass, Award for New Talent in Glass, 2002
• Creative Glass Center of America, Fellowship, 2002 & 1991
• The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Biennial Award, 2001
• Fulbright Fellowship, Czech Republic, 1999–2000

Permanent Collections[link]

United States[link]

• Racine Art Museum and RAM’s Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, Racine, Wisconsin
• Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin
• Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia - Dress VIII (2002), Reclining Drapery Impression (2009)^[4]
• The Corning Museum, Corning, New York - Specimen IV Sloth (1997), Blue Dress (1998), Evening Dress with Shawl (2004)^[5][6]
• Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas - Dress Impression with Wrinkled Cowl (2007)^[7][8]
• M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, California - Dress 3 (2001)
• Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN - Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery (2006)^[9]
• The Museum of American Glass, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey
• Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA - Pianist's Dress Impression (2005) ^[10]
• The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Renwick Gallery, Washington DC - Untitled (2002), Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery (2007)^[11]
• The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH - Dress Impression with Train (2005)
• The Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona - Bottle Clothesline (1995)

International[link]

• Alexander Tutsek Foundation, Munich, Germany - Lark Mirror (2004), Oval Mirror (2004)^[12]
• National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia - Dress 4 (2001)^[13]
• Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France

Exhibitions[link]

Installation image from Floating World exhibition in 2011. Large scale works in ceramic, bronze, cast glass and wood.

• 2010 Floating World, Palm Desert, CA
• 2010 Réflexions Féminines. Musée-Atelier départemental du Verre, Sars-Poteries, France^[14]
• 2010 Drapery Abstractions, Heller Gallery, New York, NY^[15]
• 2009 Contemporary Glass Among the Classics. Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA^[16]
• 2005 Absence Adorned. Museum of Glass International Center for Contemporary Art, Tacoma, WA
• 2004 Vanitas. Czech Museum of Fine Art, Prague, Czech Republic^[17]

Karen LaMonte Studio[link]

Karen LaMonte Studio is run by her husband, Steven Polaner. He has worked with LaMonte since 2001 managing and assisting LaMonte with her artwork and installations. He accompanies her on research expeditions such as a seven month Japan/U.S. cultural exchange fellowship in 2007.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Karen LaMonte

• Karen LaMonte Official Website
• Karen LaMonte Artist facebook page

References[link]

1. ^ "Karen LaMonte Biography", ImagoGalleries.com, 2010
2. ^ "Robin Rice Essays - Karen LaMonte", Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, March 4, 2008
3. ^ Danto, Arthur (2005). "The Poetry of Meaning and Loss: The Glass Dresses of Karen LaMonte". Tacoma, WA: Museum of Glass, International Center for Contemporary Art. http://karenlamonte.com/media/Danto%20Poetry%20of%20Meaning%20and%20Loss.pdf. 
4. ^ ChryslerCollection.org, Collections Catalog
5. ^ collection.cmog.org, Collections Catalog
6. ^ "Reinstallation of Evening Dress with Shawl by Karen LaMonte at The Corning Museum of Glass", CorningMuseumOfGlass, February 11, 2010
7. ^ CrystalBridgesMuseum.org, Collections Catalog
8. ^ Art Knowledge News, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art presents Portraits & Glass Sculpture, April 2010
9. ^ HunterMuseum.org, Collections Catalog, 2008
10. ^ PSMuseum.org, Annual Report 2008-2009, pg 15, 2009
11. ^ AmericanArt.si.edu Colelctions Catalog, updated 2009
12. ^ ATutsek-Stiftung.de, Collections Catalog
13. ^ ArtSearch.nga.gov.au, Collections Catalog
14. ^ NordMag.fr, Le Musée-Atelier départemental du Verre de Sars-Poteries - Agenda (in French), 2010
15. ^ HellerGallery.com, Exhibition Archive, 2010
16. ^ Chrysler.org, Exhibition Archive, 2009
17. ^ cmvu.cz, Exhibition Archive, 2004

‎Robert A. Lehrman is an American novelist, commentator, speechwriter, Democratic aide, and teacher.

Former White House Chief Speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore (1993-95), Lehrman has written six books including several award-winning novels, and thousands of speeches for Democratic politicians, corporate and nonprofit CEOs, and celebrities.^[1] He is perhaps best known for his non-fiction book, The Political Speechwriter’s Companion: A Guide for Writers and Speakers^[2], a systematic look at the techniques and strategies of modern political speech.^[1]

Professional Background[link]

Lehrman frequently writes and speaks about politics and speech. He is a contributor to AOLNews, and has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, Politico, Christian Science Monitor and other periodicals.

A long-time Adjunct Professor at American University, Lehrman teaches public speaking and created AU’s course on political speechwriting which he co-teaches with Professor Eric Schnure. ^[3] Along with American University Professor Leonard Steinhorn, he co-founded the commentary site, PunditWire.

In 2010, American University named Lehrman its Adjunct Professor of the Year, one of only 5 all-university awards given by the school.^[1]

Lehrman graduated from Tufts University, and received an MFA from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where he studied with Richard Yates and Kurt Vonnegut. After Iowa he taught at Muscatine (IA) Community College. He then worked as a campaign organizer and later speechwriter for Governor Dan Walker (D-IL).

He also worked as a speechwriter for Governor Hugh Carey (D-NY), then for the CEO and other officers of Texaco before moving to Washington DC where he worked for Senator Lloyd Bentsen, and Majority Whips William H. Gray and David Bonior before moving to the White House where he wrote over 250 speeches for Gore and edited about the same number, before beginning his own business, Lehrman Communications, in 1996.

Works[link]

Lehrman’s most recent book, The Political Speechwriter’s Companion (CQPress 2009), draws on almost two hundred examples taken mostly from American political speeches to demonstrate how one structure and what he calls the LAWS of political speech – language, anecdote, wit, and support – can be effective in almost any political setting. In chapters that include speeches and excerpts annotated to show how each technique works, Lehrman analyzes how to be effective, whether on the stump, on the floor, or in ceremonial speeches ranging from commencements to eulogies to keynotes. He presents an original way to close speeches that has been compared to what Alan Monroe did for the motivated sequence.^[4]

The book has won praise from a wide and bipartisan assortment of politicians, journalists, and academics, including former Republican Senator from Maine William Cohen, who said of the book, said, “what Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style is to the written word, Bob Lehrman’s book is to the spoken one.”

From 1980 through 1993 Lehrman also wrote 4 novels, three for young adults and one for grownups. Those include:

• Juggling - This novel, set in the 1960s about a high school soccer player and his first romance, became controversial because of its frankness about teenage life, but won wide praise for nuance and authenticity, winning an American Library Association Best Book award, in 1983 and many other honors. In 1987, Ms. Magazine celebrating its 15th Anniversary, named the novel one of “15 Great Books for Teenagers” appearing during the life of the magazine. Jack Forman, in Horn Book, described Juggling and two other novels as exemplifying "the achievements of the best young adult realistic fiction." ^[5] Chris Crowe's More Than a Game: Sports Literature for Young Adults lists Juggling as one of the "100 best sports novels of all time for young adults.^[6]

• Defectors - Set in the 1950s, this novel for adults also featured a sports theme: the narrator is an American miler who befriends a Soviet defector and wrestles with what to do when the United States decides to send the defector back. “Strong first novel … extraordinarily evocative,” said Publisher’s Weekly, while Seven Percent Solution author Nicholas Meyer wrote, “rich in its exploration of moral complexities, wonderuflly evocative of a time and place.” ^[7]

• The Store that Mama Built - Based on Lehrman’s own family, this finalist (one of three), for the 1993 National Jewish Book Award for Juvenile Literature tells the story of a Jewish immigrant family struggling to keep their store in business after the father’s death.

• Doing Time, a non-fiction book for young adults which Lehrman co-wrote with Phyllis Elperin Clark, was a Jane Addams Children's Book Award-winner in addition to other honors.^[8]

Other publication by Lehrman include articles, reviews, and short stories under own name in a wide range of publications—the New York Times, WomenSports, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Illinois Times, Public Relations Journal, Transatlantic Review, Louisville Review, Tufts Magazine and many others. Documentary scripts include Bradley Whitford's narration for Alliance for Justice award-winning 2007 film, Quiet Revolution.

Books[link]

• The Political Speechwriter’s Companion: A Guide for Writers and Speakers CQPress 2009
• The Store That Mama Built (novel) MacMillan 1992
• Separations (novel), Viking 1990; paperback Puffin/Viking 1993
• Defectors (novel), Arbor House/Morrow 1988; Japanese Edition Hayakawa 1990
• Juggling (novel) Harper & Row 1982; paperback Pacer Books 1984
• Doing Time: A Look at Crime and Prisons (co-author, non-fiction) Hastings House 1980

Selected Articles[link]

State of the Union: The crafting of a speech (Christian Science Monitor cover story, January 2011)

Friends, Romans, Countrymen (Tufts Magazine cover story, Summer 2010)

Richard Yates Remembered (From The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers' Workshop (Hyperion, 1999))

Interviews[link]

Interview with Mark Ragan of Ragan Communications for its Social Media Leadership Series.

References[link]

External links[link]

• [1]
• [2]
• [3]
• [4]
• [5]

Alexis Rockman (born 1962) is an American contemporary artist known for his paintings that provide rich depictions of future landscapes as they might exist with impacts of climate change and evolution influenced by genetic engineering.^[2][3] He has exhibited his work in the United States since 1985, including a 2004 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, and internationally since 1989.^[4] Alexis Rockman lives in New York City, and works out of a studio in the city's TriBeCa neighborhood.^[5]

Life[link]

Rockman was born and grew up in New York City.^[2][6] Rockman's stepfather, an Australian jazz musician, brought the family to Australia frequently.^[7] As a child, Rockman frequented the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where his mother, Diana Wall, worked for anthropologist Margaret Mead.^[5][7][8] Rockman has a particular fascination with cockroaches and rats, and admires their ability to shadow human civilization.^[9]

Growing up, Rockman had an interest in Natural History and Science, and developed fascination for film, animation, and the arts.^[10] From 1980 to 1982, Rockman studied animation at the Rhode Island School of Design,^[4][7] and continued art studies at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, receiving a BFA in fine arts in 1985.^[4]

Aside from his art career, Rockman has taken on requests from conservation groups, including the Riverkeeper project, which has fought against pollution of the Hudson River.^[5][11] He lives in the West Village with his partner, Dorothy Spears, and her two sons, Alex and Ferran Brown.^{[citation needed]}

Career[link]

Early career 1985–1993[link]

In the mid and late-1980s, Rockman began exhibiting his work at the Jay Gorney Modern Art Gallery in New York City in the East Village and relocated to SoHo in 1988.^[4][12] Rockman also had exhibitions at galleries in Los Angeles, Boston, and Philadelphia in the late 1980s.^[4] In Phylum, Rockman draws upon the work of Ernst Haeckel, a proponent of Darwinism.^[13] In 1992, Rockman painted his first mural, Evolution.^[14]

A series of works by Rockman in the early 1990s, including Barnyard Scene (1990), Jungle Fever (1991), The Trough (1992), and Biosphere: Laboratory (1993), use dark humor in depicting different species mating with one another.^[15] In Barnyard Scene, Rockman depicts a raccoon mating with a rooster, and Jungle Fever shows a praying mantis mating with a chipmunk.^[16] In the Biosphere series of paintings, Rockman alludes to the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona and envisions a situation where the Earth has become too toxic for human life, so life only exists in strangely mutated forms inside geodesic-dome structures.^[17] Biosphere draws references from science fiction cinema, particularly the opening scene of the 1971 film Silent Running',^[18] as well as Stanley Kubrick's 2001, and Ridley Scott's Alien.^[9] Biosphere: The Ocean (1994), influenced by H. R. Giger's work, depicts a shark with a long, bionic sawfish beak, suited for tearing through its food.^[19][20]

In 1993, Rockman created Still Life, a still life depiction of a pile of fish and marine specimens, evoking reference to 1935 horror James Whale film Bride of Frankenstein and films by Luis Buñuel.^[9] In Still Life, Rockman alludes to the Wunderkammer, placing "aberrant contents" amidst a Baroque still life scene, which traditionally is abundant with wealth and goods from Dutch and Spanish colonies.^[21]

Travels[link]

Many of Alexis Rockman's works have been inspired by his travels around the world, including to Costa Rica, Brazil, Madagascar, Guyana, Tasmania, and Antarctica. Rockman traveled to Guyana in 1994 with fellow artist Mark Dion, resulting in numerous paintings of the flora and fauna that he observed. For the 1994 trip, he strictly painted works that depicted what he saw, with particular interest in various types of insects. Neblina (1995), one of the last works resulting from the Guyana trip, was painted after the collapse of a tailings dam at the Omni gold mine in Guyana, resulting in cyanide leaking into the waterway. Neblina shows wildlife huddled together high in tree branches.^[19][22] Rockman returned to Guyana in 1998, and his works from that trip focused on aspects of ecotourism.^[23] Rockman traveled to Antarctica in 2008 with Dorothy Spears, and works resulting from this voyage were featured in the "Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape" exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.^[24]

Future Evolution and Wonderful World 2000–2004[link]

Rockman's interest in science lead to a book collaboration with scientist and author Peter Douglass Ward called "Future Evolution", which was published in 2001. Rockman and Ward collaborated, with Ward writing the text and Rockman creating the images.^[17][25] Rockman and Ward portray the future as abundant with plants and animals, but they are descendants of weedy species or feral domestics.^[26]

Rockman's painting The Farm was exhibited at the Exit Art Gallery in New York City in 2000, as part of the "Paradise Now" exhibition. The work depicts various animals and plants in a soybean field, and how they may appear in the future, as a result of genetic engineering.^[27] For this work, Rockman consulted with molecular biologist Rob DeSalle at the American Museum of Natural History.^{[citation needed]} "The Farm" lead to a residency and a body of work of four other 8x10' paintings called "Wonderful World", which was shown at the Camden Art Center in London in 2004.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Manifest Destiny 2004

In 2004, the Brooklyn Museum featured Manifest Destiny, an 8-by-24-foot oil-on-wood mural by Rockman as a centerpiece for the second-floor Mezzanine Gallery and marking the opening of the renovated Grand Lobby and plaza at the museum.^[28] Manifest Destiny portrays the Brooklyn waterfront amidst tropical vegetation and absent any humans, in the year 5004, after climate change has caused catastrophic sea level rise.^[29] Rockman sketched out initial ideas for the mural in January 2000, and Brooklyn Museum director Arnold L. Lehman officially commissioned the mural in 2002. Rockman began work on the mural in March 2003, consulting with experts in various fields, including Peter Ward and scientists at Columbia University's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, as well as architects Diane Lewis and Chris Morris.^[7] Rockman shows the outcome 3000 years in the future, depicting tropical plants, mutated fish and sea creatures glowing with radioactivity amidst the ruins of buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the wrecks of a Dutch sailing ship and a 20th-century submarine.^{[7][30][30][31]} Rockman's project suggests what the remote geological, botanical, and zoological future might bring, predicting the ecosystem of the area thousands of years ahead. This mural was exhibited from April 2004–September 2004 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.^[7]

Baroque Biology 2007[link]

Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center featured works by Rockman and Tony Matelli in the 2007 exhibition, "Baroque Biology".^[32] In Romantic Attachments, Rockman portrays, in an allegorical manner, a male Homo georgicus together with a female human in a romantic encounter.^[33][34] The Homo georgicus dates from 1.8 million years ago, intermediate in the evolutionary timeline between Homo habilis and H. erectus.^[32] In Romantic Attachments, Rockman references Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, depicting the torch-bearing male Homo georgicus in place of Bernini's spear-bearing male angel towering over a female, who in both Bernini's and Rockman's work is portrayed in a sexual manner. Sculptor and paleoartist Viktor Deak created two reference models for Rockman of a male Homo georgicus.^[35]

Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition[link]

From November 2010 to May 8, 2011, Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow, was featured at the Smithsonian American Art Museum^[36] The exhibition, the first to survey Rockman's career, presented 47 paintings and works on paper by Rockman. The title of the exhibition refers to the title of the first chapter of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring.^[37] As of Autumn Quarter 2011, this exhibition is currently being hosted at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, which previously hosted prints of Evolution and Manifest Destiny.

Style[link]

In his work, Rockman uses the language of natural history to examine our relationship to it as a culture. He draws influence from the 19th century Hudson River School, and identifies his work as pop art, "using natural history as his iconography".^[5][6] Rockman has sometimes been associated with a New Gothic Art movement.^[38]

Hudson River School[link]

Hudson River School artists portrayed American landscapes, in a utopian way, as a haven for Europeans escaping oppression. Rockman turns this idea upside down, depicting apocalyptic scenes, while incorporating realism of the Hudson River School.^[39] Influences include Albert Bierstadt's Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, which depicts landscapes of the western United States before the culmination of Manifest Destiny when railroads linked the Pacific and Atlantic coasts.^[6] Hudson River School artists Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church also inspired Rockman,^[7] particularly Cole's painting The Course of Empire – Desolation.

Other early influences for Rockman included the artwork and dioramas featured at the American Museum of Natural History.^[40] He has also spent extensive time studying old field guides and other such material.^[38]

Film and animation[link]

Rockman also draws some influence from film and animation, and has admiration for the work of various film designers, particularly the science fiction genre. Rockman admires the work of Syd Mead, designer for the film Blade Runner,^[10] fantasy art and science fiction illustrator Chesley Bonestell, and Jan Švankmajer;^[7] stop motion animators including Willis O'Brien, Ray Harryhausen, Brothers Quay; and various Eastern European avant-garde filmmakers.^[18] Jonathan Crary, Columbia University professor, sees similarities between Rockman and artists Piero di Cosimo, Albrecht Altdorfer, Edward Hicks, Theodore Rousseau, Joan Miró (The Ploughed Field or The Hunter), and Yves Tanguy. Crary notes how Rockman combines imaginary and visionary portrayal in an allegorical manner with scientific basis, study of the natural world, and experimental hypothesis.^[21]

Other influences[link]

Rockman also drew inspiration from Chesley Bonestell's 1950 Collier's magazine illustration Atom Bombing of New York City, which depicts Manhattan amidst destruction and a glowing orange aura of an atomic bomb.^[29][41]

People that have influenced Rockman include Stephen Jay Gould, whom Rockman met and later wrote two essays about Rockman's work for the monograph published by Monacelli Press. Charles R. Knight has a special place in Rockman's development, as he almost single-handedly created the genre of reconstructions of extinct ecosystems.^[40]

Some of Rockman's more recent works, including paintings featured in the 2008 Rose Art Museum exhibition, featured a more semi-abstract style than some of Rockman's earlier work that give traditional representation, creating some tension between the styles.^[42][43] In reviewing Rockman's 2008 Rose Art Museum exhibition, "The Weight of Air", The Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee describes Rockman's work as exhibiting a clash of abstract and his earlier styles, producing "a kind of distraction – a desire in the mind's eye to marry them that is continually frustrated," he though praised Rockman for taking on such subject matter. While Smee found some of Rockman's work overly jarring with clashing styles, Smee praised other pieces, including Wind Regime (2007), describing it as a "stunning painting".^[42]

Publications[link]

• Rush, Michael, ed (2008). The Weight of Air. The Rose Art Museum. ISBN 0-9761593-6-8.
• Distel, Matt, ed (2007). Romantic Attachments. Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. ISBN 0-917562-79-8.
• Big Weather, American Icons. Leo Koenig Inc.. 2006.
• Fresh Kills. Gary Tatintsian Gallery Inc.. 2005. (in English & Russian)
• Alexis Rockman. The Monacelli Press. 2004. ISBN 1-58093-118-9.
• Manifest Destiny. Gorney Bravin + Lee / Brooklyn Museum. 2004. ISBN 0-87273-151-0.
• Wonderful World. Camden Arts Centre. 2004. ISBN 1-900470-32-2.
• Mittelbach, Margaret (2005). Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger. Text Publishing. ISBN 1-920885-84-3. Rockman's 2004 journeys in Tasmania are recorded in the book Carnivorous Nights, with his accompanying artwork.
• Ward, Peter (2002). Future Evolution. Henry Holt & Co. ISBN 0-7167-3496-6. Rockman did the illustrations for the book Future Evolution, by Peter Douglas Ward.^[17]
• Dioramas. Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. 1997.
• Dion, Mark; Alexis Rockman (1997). Concrete Jungle: A Pop Media Investigation of Death and Survival in Urban Ecosystems. Juno Books. ISBN 0-9651042-2-2.
• Guyana. Twin Palms Publishers. 1996. ISBN 0-944092-41-1.
• Blinderman, Barry, ed. Second Nature. University Galleries of Illinois State University. ISBN 0-945558-23-6.
• Evolution. Sperone Westwater. 1992.
• Blau, Douglas (1992). Alexis Rockman. Jay Gorney Modern Art, New York and Thomas Solomon's Garage.
• Decter, Joshua (1991). Alexis Rockman. John Post Lee Gallery.

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Small World: Dioramas in Contemporary Art / essays by Toby Kamps and Ralph Rugoff. San Diego, Calif. : Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2000. ISBN 0-934418-54-3
• Gardner, Paul (2001). "Flora, Fauna and Fossils in the Drawings of Alexis Rockman". On paper: the journal of prints, drawings, and photography 6(2): 58–63. 
• Mitchell, W. J. Thomas (September 2003). "The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction". Modernism/modernity 10(3): 481–500. http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/modernism-modernity/v010/10.3mitchell.pdf. 

External links[link]

• "Artist's official site". http://alexisrockman.net/. Retrieved October 14, 2010. 
• "Art and Science Lecture Series: Alexis Rockman". Smithsonian American Art Museum. January 12, 2011. http://americanart.si.edu/calendar/lectures/archive/rockman/. Retrieved January 26, 2011. 
• "Alexis Rockman interview". Gothamist. http://gothamist.com/2004/07/14/alexis_rockman_painter.php. Retrieved October 14, 2010. 
• "Manifesting Ecologic and Microbial Connections – Emerging Infectious Diseases (CDV)". http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol12no04/about_cover.htm. Retrieved October 14, 2010. 
• "Alexis Rockman: Our True Nature". Greenpeace. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/alexis-rockman-our-true-natur/. Retrieved October 14, 2010. 
• "Alexis Rockman". Frieze Magazine. September–October 1997. http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/alexis_rockman/. Retrieved October 25, 2010. 
• Articles about Alexis Rockman. New York Times
• Alexis Rockman on artnet