Top Ten Favorite Holiday Movies as Seen in American Art

What is cozier than watching old holiday movies on a chilly winter’s night? At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, we make a game out of movie night by spotting the similarities between certain films and artworks in the collection. Share your own favorite holiday movie and American artwork pairings by exploring the museum’s collection and tagging @AmericanArt .

This silly Will Ferrell vehicle tops the list as a sweet family comedy that still elicits giggles as Buddy the misfit elf tries to make sense of life outside the North Pole. His preferred diet, however, is one we are seriously considering embracing for the holidays this year. Artist Will Cotton, known for his paintings of confectionary landscapes, is another Will who knows the allure of pop culture + pure sugar.

For thirty years, little Kevin McCallister has been defending his home from the conniving yet inept Wet Bandits using whatever weapons he could improvise out of household items and electrics. Luckily for thieves Marv and Harry, the McCallister family didn’t have any Man Rays lying around.

There are so many insane and memorable human characters in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation , it is hard to pick just one to talk about. Clark Griswold! Cousin Eddie! Uncle Lewis! Todd and Margo! So, instead, let’s focus on the animal notables, of which there are several. In that category, the all-time scene stealer (in my opinion) comes is the form of an improbably man-eating and magically gravity-defying squirrel. The beast comes flying out of the Christmas tree as if from a slingshot, to a chorus of horror-movie screams—and audience laughter. Hilda Katz’s wild-eyed Squirrel in Tree might be mistaken for its rodent twin.

This animated musical kicks off during the Mousekewitz family’s Hanukkah celebration, where Papa mouse gives an important gift to his small son Fievel and sings to him about the promise of life in a New World, and the assurance that there are “no cats in America, and the streets are paved with cheese.” Hmmm, these old-world, country mice will have a lot to learn when they make it to New York City. While many cheerier and more famous animated musical films have been released in the decades since, this one still packs a tender if melancholic holiday punch. Just try to listen to “Somewhere Out There” during this year of social distancing and not get a little misty.

Since we are already getting misty, let’s just lean into all the feels and skate away on a river of tears, like Emma Thompson’s character Karen does when she finds out her husband Harry (Alan Rickman) is cheating on her. The memorably devastating scene in this romantic holiday favorite is a reminder that, sometimes, heartbreak and the holidays go hand in hand.

Ready to move past the tears, and embrace a healthy dose of vengeance? After watching the cheating Alan Rickman in Love Actually , there is something just a wee bit cathartic about seeing the actor work his villainous vibe—and meet his fate—at the Nakatomi Plaza building.

Let us acknowledge up front the existence of a whole world of online discourse around whether Die Hard is or isn’t a Christmas film, which we do not need to get into, though you can guess from its inclusion on this list which side of the debate we take. A more delightful (and less contentious) Internet rabbit hole consists of observations on the way the title of the Bruce Willis classic has been translated into other languages. For example, it is titled “Die Slowly” in German. In Greek it is “Very Hard to Die.” Spanish gives us the evocative title, “Glass Jungle.” But perhaps my favorite is the Norwegian translation, “Action Skyscraper,” which wins the prize for clarity in expectation setting. Howard Cook’s Skyscraper , from 1928 is certainly also worthy of the title “Action Skyscraper,” hulking and ominous in a darkly shrouded sky.

All dogs may go to heaven, but I think we can agree that there should be extra jewels in the heavenly collar of Max the Dog, companion to the garlic-souled, cuddly-as-a-cactus Mr. Grinch. Loyal and true to his undeserving master, very good boy Max puts up with numerous indignities without complaint. Raya Bodnarchuk’s All Good Dogs , carved from white pine, captures the essence of this universally angelic canine spirit. See more good dogs in SAAM’s collection.

Nearly a century old, this scene by an unidentified photographer, Boy with Toy Gun , has shades of Ralphie and his quest for a “Red Ryder Carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time.”

Please note that although it is an “indescribably beautiful” piece of work, for some reason the Smithsonian American Art Museum does not have a leg lamp in our collection.

Joseph Stella’s drawing, Pine Tree , from 1919, is bringing those Charlie Brown tree vibes. A little wispy, not conventionally beautiful, but full of soul...and a little sappy.

It isn’t hard to imagine how that this black and white etching, The Sleigh Ride , might depict the quaint fictional town of Bedford Falls, setting of Jimmy Stewart’s sentimental holiday classic. Some fans believe director Frank Capra took inspiration from the real-life community of Seneca Falls, New York, another quiet mill town.

Happy holidays from your friends at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Share your own favorite cinema and American artwork pairings and tag @AmericanArt .

Women’s Voices Ring With a Resounding Roar in This New Show

Patience Torlowei gasps as she turns the corner in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art to see her centerpiece work Esther for the first time in five years.

“Please bear with me, because I can’t contain myself,” she says. Named after her then-recently deceased mother, the hand-painted gown depicting vivid scenes of mineral extraction along with war scenes, was the first haute couture work to be acquired by the museum.

Today, it’s on display again in a lively, year-long showcase at the museum and titled: “I Am … Contemporary Women Artists of Africa.”

Esther , which Torlowei says was “about the truth of what’s going on in Africa,” represents a difficult time in her life, in part because she could not bear to sell the work. “This is about Africa. This is about my mother,” she says. “I may be broke, but if I sell this dress, I’m selling the story of Africa. I want people to learn from it.”

So Torlowei, who has since become a renowned Nigerian fashion designer, donated Esther to the African Art Museum, where it joins 29 other artworks in the show by 27 contemporary artists representing 10 countries.

It’s only a fraction of the total of works by women artists held in the African Art Museum’s collections, says curator Karen E. Milbourne . But many of the pieces are on display for the first time.

“I Am…,” which takes its title from Helen Reddy’s 1971 pop music hit “I Am Woman,” is part of the museum’s Women’s Initiative Fund, an effort to increase the visibility of female artists in its shows, publications, partnerships and in its collections. An assessment seven years ago found that just 11 percent of the named artists represented in the collections were works by women.

“We immediately recognized that wasn’t okay,” says Milbourne. An effort after that finding doubled the number to 22 percent, but the effort is ongoing, she says.

“This museum has been ahead in trying to identify these issues, recognize [the museum’s] history, and share our history so that other institutions can do differently, better, moving forward,” Milbourne says.

“This is a really special exhibition,” adds the museum’s director Gus Casely-Hayford . “I felt changed by it, but also really inspired by it.”

Some of the oldest pieces in the show are derived from textile art, crafts like weaving and dyeing that African women embraced by tradition. In Nigeria, Chief Nike Davies-Okundaye used the expressive patterns and textures as a background for her drawing and painting, as in the diptych displayed, Liberal Women Protest March I & II. Atop patterns in a Yoruba textile art known as adire , she painted a group of women gathered at a nonviolent demonstration.

“You communicate with what you are wearing,” says Davies-Okundaye, who strolled the exhibition in a vivid headdress. “Especially this color red, which is for power,” she says, pointing at her work. “Nigerian women are very, very powerful.”

Billie Zangewa’s self-portrait in silk, “Constant Gardener,” depicts the artist harvesting Swiss chard, drawing on the agricultural past of her ancestors and also reflecting a personal philosophy. “It’s about tending to my son, tending to myself, my life and who I am,” says Zangewa, a Malawian-born artist who lives in South Africa. Zangewa, who has been fascinated by fashion since childhood, briefly crafted purses and handbags and worked in fashion and advertising before returning to the visual arts. Milbourne says the piece “shows her ability to move between fashion and fine arts and to speak to a truly individual experience that speaks to each and every one of us.”

Fabric is not the only medium in the wide-ranging, multi-media show. In Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s 2016 Wedding Souvenirs , a collage with acrylic, the artist depicts scenes from a Nigerian wedding, but in addition, Milbourne says, you also see “a woman who is completely composed. She is in possession of her space. She is not looking at us, she is looking into herself for all that she can contribute.” As such it’s the first image seen in the show. “It seemed to sum up the experience of ‘I Am,’” Milbourne says. “You see a woman in full possession of that phrase.”

Nearby is an eye-catching sculpture from Moroccan artist Batoul S’Himi . Her 2011 piece Untitled from her “World Under Pressure” series is an actual pressure cooker with a map of the world cut from its side. It speaks of the “mounting pressure to give women their due,” the curator says.

The South African artist Nompumelelo Ngoma presents a near abstract monoprint, Take Care of Me, that examines the complexities of a wedding gown pattern in more ways than one.

Women are wrapped in stiff lace at a funeral depicted in Nigerian artist Sokari Douglas Camp’s brightly-colored mixed-media work, Sketch for Church Ede .

Nigerian-born artist Toyin Ojih Odutola presents a compelling profile Untitled (D.O. Back Study) , a seeming silhouette done entirely in densely drawn ballpoint pen. It’s among a number of unconventional methods in the exhibition—but none more than Diane Victor’s remarkably representational Good Shepherd , rendered entirely with the smoke of a candle.

There are a couple of life-sized figures in the exhibition. Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu fashions her Tree Woman with earth, pulp stone and branches. Adejoke Tugbiyele’s 2015 Past/Future fashions a bent figure from brooms, strainers and wire.

South African artist Frances Goodman deconstructs the amorous traditions of the car back set with her Skin on Skin , whose title is spelled out in faux pearls across a car seat minus its stuffing. “They hang on the wall, almost like skins—like these deflated icons,” Goodman says. “With their pomp and ceremony taken out of them.”

Helga Kohl depicts the remains of a ghost town after a nearby diamond mine in Kolmanskop, Namibia, was exhausted and abandoned, the surrounding sands now reclaiming bedrooms. “One day I knew I was ready to capture the beauty once created by people and taken over by nature,” she says.

Among the photographic images, South African Zanele Muholi seeks to make black lesbians more visible. “I’m basically saying that we deserve recognition, respect, validation and to have publications that mark and trace our existence,” the artist says in a statement.

Some incidents are better known than others. Senzeni Marasela depicts in red thread on linen the history of Sarah Baartman , the 19th-century African woman that was put on display in Europe as a curiosity, while Sue Williamson commemorates a lesser known multiracial neighborhood demolished by South Africa’s apartheid government in her 1993 The Last Summer Revisited .

Penny Siopis takes a notorious story, of a nun murdered by a crowd following an anti-apartheid protest, and illustrates it with found home movies in her 2011 video Communion . It is, she explains, “about an individual caught up in a larger, political context, but it’s elemental enough. . . to see, or to envisage in it, a way to speak beyond the specific historical and political moment.”

“I Am … Contemporary Women Artists of Africa” continues through July 5, 2020 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.

For This Year’s Crop of Smithsonian Craft Show Artists, the Pandemic Changes Everything

It was a year ago when jurors decided on the 100 top artists and crafts people to be included in the 2020 edition of the 38th edition of the prestigious Smithsonian Craft Show —back in the days when people could meet freely.

But the lavish springtime showcase at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. was delayed from April to the fall. And eventually the Craft Show became, like nearly everything else in the arts this year, a strictly online event. For 13 days from October 13 to 25, the works of the selected contemporary crafters will be on display and for sale through the Bidsquareom platform. (The proceeds provide critical funding to the Institution's research, educational programs and exhibitions.)

Festivities kick off Tuesday with a special Smithsonian Visionary Award ceremony given to celebrated Seattle ceramicist Patti Warashina . The craft show gala, which will also be virtual, will be held October 21 with host celebrity chef Carla Hall and speaker Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, followed by an online live auction .

The pandemic even seems to have dominated the homepage for the 2020 event, with a big photograph of Judith Kinghorn’s gold pendant that looks for all the world like COVID-19 virus (instead, it’s a similarly round allium flower from the Minneapolis jewelry designer who often turns to nature for inspiration).

“Nature, as always, is a great inspiration for all these designers, especially when you’re working with your hands and using natural materials, says Emily Orr, an assistant curator at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum , who served as one of the show’s three jurors, along with glass artist Toots Zynsky and Kari Herrin from the Savannah College of Art and Design.

“This year there was a real aim to extend the boundaries of what’s included,” says Orr. That meant an increased focus on design to reflect contemporary ways of craft making, including things that were 3-D printed and incorporated other new technology in their making. “That’s not something that’s been considered in previous years, so that was a big shift.”

Categories for the show remained the same—ceramics, fiber and basketry, furniture, glass, jewelry, leather and metal, paper, wearable art and wood. But entries within those categories grew. “There’s just such diversity within those categories, you really see the range of work that’s being made in mostly traditional materials and how the boundaries are being pushed,” Orr says. “In the category of wood, for instance, there were guitars, brooms and handbags. This is not a typical group that you might classify together had they not been grouped together by their material.”

The broom-maker, Hannah Beatrice Quinn , represents two other aspects of a more diverse Craft Show this year—a younger artist, at 27, and one whose wares are modestly priced.

“I don’t want to make things I can’t afford,” says Quinn, a Washington, D.C. native who recently set up shop in Santa Fe. Like a lot of artists, she says the pandemic has allowed her more time in the studio though she had trouble at first setting up an online business. “Going virtual is hard for me,” she says. “I’m not a computer person.”

While it’s the first time in the Craft Show for Quinn, another young artist, Sara Thompson of Portland, Oregon, is back for her third time at only 24. “A lot of the people I met at shows have been doing this longer than I’ve been alive,” says Thompson, who works in sterling silver vessels. But she’s old enough to understand the economics of the moment. “This pandemic points out how fragile artists’ incomes are,” she says. “Virtual shows won’t come close to replacing the income I’ve lost to the pandemic.”

It’s the same for longtime fixtures of the Craft Show for years, such as Cliff Lee , 69, of Hershey, Pennsylvania, whose ceramics have been part of the show for 30 years. “There are no shows and no collectors able to travel, so my income has disappeared,” Lee says of the shutdown. “I have taken refuge in my studio.”

It’s tough, too, for Holly Anne Mitchell of Indianapolis who makes jewelry out of newspaper comics. “The isolation, the quarantine,” she says. “I miss being around people.”

But for Warashina, winner of the Visionary Award, the isolation is normal. “I’m used to being in my studio by myself,” she says over the phone from Seattle. At 80, she’s working on a series of drawings that respond to the urgency of the time. “It’s crazy—the hurricanes, the fires, the politics,” she says. “I guess it’s just so surreal, and I love surrealism.”

The drawings may be a departure from her ceramic work, which has also drawn on surrealism but is marked by its humor as well. “That’s a welcome thing to see, especially now,” says Orr of Warashina’s irreverent and sometimes unexpected humor. “I’m really pleased that they chose to honor someone like that.”

“The ability for objects to do storytelling—I think that’s where she really excels,” Orr says.

Born in Spokane, Washington, in 1940, Warashina went to the University of Washington intending to study science and medicine, but a drawing class in her freshman year changed all that. “I just loved it,” Warashina says. “I was really pulled to it.” She took a variety of foundation art classes after that until she began working with clay.

“It was the material that hooked me,” Warashina says. “Something about the touch of it. It was the challenge of trying to overcome the physicality of the clay, controlling it on a wheel. The material keeps drawing you in, you keep learning from it.”

She blended exquisite form with a controlled painterly style inspired by René Magritte and Hieronymus Bosch. Soon, the artist began her sly social commentary in celebrated series from her White Figures and Stacked Pyramids to her giant size Mile Post Queens . One Warashina in the Smithsonian collection is her 35-inch-long 1971 Convertible Car Kiln in which a brick-covered coupe has its seats seemingly ablaze (the delicate, painted flames also made from clay).

She was inspired to do a series of intricate ceramic pieces depicting imagined roadside crashes, with telephone poles and wires, all in white. “I was thinking of the classical figures from Europe,” she says. “Though at one time those things were painted.”

One of her most monumental pieces was a 1986 commission now located at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle depicting 72 figures of Northwest artists, inspired by a Diego Rivera mural she saw at the Hotel del Prado, Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central .

Among the artists she depicted was a previous Visionary Award winner, glass artist Dale Chihuly. Of her own winning of the Smithsonian prize, Warashina says, “I’m so excited.” But she regrets that she can’t receive it in person because of the lingering shutdown. “That’s the worst part,” she says “I haven’t been to Washington D.C. for a number of years. But maybe I’ll venture back next year.”

The 38th Smithsonian Craft Show will be held virtually from October 13 to 25 online, where it is free to browse and shop. The Visionary Award ceremony October 13 at 8 EST is free but requires pre-registration at the website. That’s the same procedure for the craft show gala October 21, which includes a live online auction. Proceeds fund research, education programs and exhibitions at the Smithsonian Exhibition.