The Art of Video Games

Smithsonian American Art Museum
03/16/2012 – 09/09/2012
Video games use images, actions and player participation to tell stories and engage their audiences. Much in the way of film, animation, and performance, video games are a compelling and influential form of narrative art. This exhibition is the first to examine comprehensively the evolution of video games themselves as an artistic medium. From the Atari VSC to the Playstation 3, the show documents the development since the 1970s of visual effects and aesthetics, the emergence of games as a means for storytelling, the influence of world events and popular culture on game development, and the impact games can have on society. Multimedia presentations of video game footage, video interviews with developers and artists, large prints of in-game screen shots, historic video game consoles, and a selection of working video game systems for visitors to play are included.

 

Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color and Space

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Feb. 23, 2012—May 13, 2012
The focus of this exhibition is to explain the international light-and-space art movement of the mid- and late 20th century. The exhibition consists of large-scale installations by five artists from South America who created landmark works in the 1950s and 1960s—Lucio Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jesús Rafael Soto and Hélio Oiticica. By developing large-scale, multimedia constructions of light and color, these Latin Americans engaged viewers more actively in a physical process of exploring the possibilities of visual and spatial perceptions. This exhibition underscores the artists’ innovative contributions and acknowledges their seminal role in the ongoing, global light-and-space tradition. The five installations—which have heretofore been known only to a small number of people—create enveloping optical effects that overwhelm and transform the sensory experience.

 

"The Civil War and American Art: Frederic Church to Winslow Homer

Smithsonian American Art Museum
11/16/2012 – 05/19/2013
Some of the finest artwork produced during the Civil War and its aftermath will be used to explore the impact of this period in history on the visual arts in America. On view are works by such leading figures as Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, Hiram Powers, and John Rogers, along with photographs by Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan. The exhibition focuses on how artists addressed the metaphorical war—dealing allegorically or elliptically with the issues of internal warfare, the future of the union, abolition and race relations, and the post-war search for a new American identity. These artists created some of the most compelling landscapes and genre paintings of the mid-19th century, often containing layers of meaning beyond their war-related allusions.

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