DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center (SAAM) -- Exhibit: The Automobile and American Art:
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- Description of Pictures: The Automobile and American Art
September 18, 2020 – Indefinitely
What could be more American than the car? From drive-ins to road trips on the open highway—cars are an essential part of American culture.
Since the birth of the automobile, cars have also been a central theme in American art, from the paintings of William H. Johnson, which highlight the perils of driving in segregated America, to the large fiberglass sculptures of Luis Jiménez, which evoke lowrider car culture. Some artists, such as sculptor David Smith, incorporated techniques they learned working on auto assembly lines into their art. Others, including Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe, used their cars as mobile studios.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection includes hundreds of artworks featuring cars. Albert H. Small’s prolific collection of model cars, a gift to the museum, provides a unique lens through which to explore these works and the role of the automobile in American art.
A selection of 100 model cars is on display on the third floor, near SAAM’s Luce Foundation Center for American Art.
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- Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- AUTOM_201015_06.JPG: Preamble, 1987
Mike Wilkins
In a show of ingenuity, Mike Wilkins used a collection of vanity license plates to phonetically spell out the preamble of the US Constitution, combining letters and numbers in a way often used by drivers to convey messages about themselves or their cars on vanity plates. All fifty states and the District of Columbia are represented with plates, which are in alphabetical order by state name. Though most of the plates make no sense on their own, together they re-create text from one of the greatest documents in American history. This work puts a fun twist on the phrase, "the United States."
- AUTOM_201015_14.JPG: The Automobile and American Art
What do you collect?
Collectors are driven by their own unique passions, from American art to model cars. Often a collection begins with one special object. Share an image of a favorite work in SAAM's collection that might inspire a collection of your own, using #atSAAM .
- AUTOM_201015_52.JPG: "For what you really collect is always yourself."
-- Jean Baudrillard, French philosopher (1929-2007)
- AUTOM_201015_64.JPG: The Automobile and American Art
What could be more American than the car?
From drive-ins to road trips on the open highway -- cars are an essential part of American culture.
Since the birth of the automobile, cars have also been a central theme in American art, from the paintings of William H. Johnson, which highlights the perils of driving in segregated America, to the large fiberglass sculptures of Luis Jimenez, which evoke lowrider car culture.
Some artists, such as sculptor David Smith, incorporated techniques they learned working on auto assembly lines into their art. Others, including Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keeffe, used their cars as mobile studios.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum's collection includes hundreds of artworks featuring cars. Albert H. Small's prolific collection of model cars, a gift to the museum, provides a unique lens through which to explore these works and the role of the automobile in American art.
- AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
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I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
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- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].
