To anyone who might ask, "Where have all the artists gone?", the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has a very good answer. That answer is parsed out in this well-research 148-page publication titled "Artists in the Workforce: 1990-2005". Released in June 2008, the publication offers a nationwide look at artists' demographic and employment patterns in the 21st century. Working with extensive...

The National Park Service has become well-known for their Teaching with Historic Places Lesson Plans series, and this recent addition is a fine complement to their previous endeavors. This particular plan deals with the workshop and life of Daniel Chester French, the noted American sculptor who is perhaps best known for his sculpture of Abraham Lincoln that graces the Lincoln Monument. The lesson...

The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) has compiled a selection of resources for the study of Texas artists, on its mobile-friendly website. One such resource is a searchable joint digital collection, Texas Artists: Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper. Partially funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the database includes contributions from Southern Methodist University, the...

Most of us think of Gauguin as the painter of a lush tropical paradise, populated with beautiful brown women with flowers tucked into their hair. This exhibition from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MoMA) documents Gauguin's experiments in other mediums in addition to paint and canvas. Over the course of his lifetime, Gauguin worked in wood carving, ceramics, lithography, wood cut...

Sara Mary Barnes Roby (1907 - 1986), born into a wealthy family in Pittsburgh, and herself a painter, believed that the best way to support the visual arts was to acquire and exhibit the works of living artists. To this end, she established the Sara Roby Foundation and began collecting American art in the mid-1950s. While the collection is strong in the work of realist painters like Reginald...

Like many museums around the country, the National Gallery of Art has an impressive collection of recorded public programs. The Notable Lecture series stretches back to 2007, and features several varieties of audio content, from art talks, to conversations with artists, to the notable lectures themselves. For example, in 2008, there's a 2-part podcast that coincided with Martin Puryear's...

Artist colonies have always fascinated the American public, and whether they have been informally organized or not, they seem to provide great opportunities for a variety of collaborations. One of the oldest of these colonies is the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. The colony was started in 1907 by the composer Edward MacDowell and his wife Marian, and over the past century it has...

Sometimes referred to as the "Father of Video Art," noted artist Nam June Paik created a diverse body of work during his life, including video sculptures, installations, and television productions. This collection from the Smithsonian American Art Museum provides selected highlights from this extensive archive housed at the institution. Visitors can read a biographical piece on Paik and then dive...

Founded in 1998 by Judy A. G. Cutler and Laurence S. Cutler, The National Museum of American Illustration is housed at Vernon Court (Newport, RI), a mansion designed 100 years previously by the firm Carrere and Hastings, architects of other notable buildings such as New York Public Library and the Frick Collection. Portions of the six acres of grounds surrounding Vernon Court were originally...