Communication Archive
MESL Content Selection Working Group
Includes communications about content selection from the National Museum of American Art.
A visit to NMAA's galleries offers an opportunity to experience
over two hundred years of the nation's visual heritage from the
eighteenth century to the present. Early highlights include
masterworks of the colonial era and early republic, and exceptional
portrait miniatures. Western art includes more than 480 paintings
of Indian life by George Catlin, varied western subjects, and
important works by Native American artists. Among nineteenth-
century landscapes are views of the Hudson River Valley and Niagara
Falls, epic-scale western vistas, and more. Nineteenth-century
marble sculptures, Paul Manship's twentieth-century bronzes and
major contemporary works highlight the museum's sculpture
collection. Impressionism and the American Renaissance are
represented by in-depth holdings of Childe Hassam, John Twachtman,
Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Thomas Wilmer Dewing and masterworks by
John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, Mary
Cassatt, and others. The museum has the finest collection of works
by African-American artists of any general museum, representing
more than 100 artists. Hispanic-American art includes Luis
Jimnez's "Vaquero" sculpture at the museum's entrance, religious
painting and sculpture, carvings, folk art, and contemporary works.
The museum's folk art collection is anchored by the Herbert Waide
Hemphill, Jr., collection of historic and contemporary folk art--
more than 400 objects. Photography and graphic arts include
documentary photographs and prints from the 1930s and 1940s,
extensive holdings of photographs by Aaron Siskind and Irving Penn,
contemporary photos, and graphics from the nineteenth and
twentieth-centuries. With a rich collection of figurative and
scene paintings, including the nation's largest collection of art
produced for New Deal-era projects, and the Patricia and Phillip
Frost Collection of American abstraction, NMAA offers an excellent
survey of twentieth century American art.
Description of the Museum
The National Museum of American Art (NMAA) is the nation's museum
dedicated to the arts and artists of the United States from the
earliest colonial times to the present. NMAA's collection of more
than 37,500 works of art--paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings,
photographs, crafts, and folk art--is the largest collection of works
by American artists in the world With its Renwick Gallery, devoted to
the study and exhibition of American crafts and decorative arts, the
museum addresses the full spectrum of American artistic pursuits from
colonial times to the present.
Last Modified: Monday, 20-Oct-2008 16:36:48 EDT