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Learn the story behind Dale Chihuly's Blanket Cylinder Series at the Renwick Gallery. Image courtesy of the American Art Museum.

Tuesday, January 17 The Loving Story

Learn about the dramatic story of Mildred and Richard P. Loving in this documentary about the 1967 landmark Supreme Court decision, Loving v. Virginia, which banned laws forbidding interracial marriages. After the film, stick around for a panel discussion with director Nancy Buirski and legal scholars. Free. 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. McEvoy Auditorium, National Portrait Gallery.

Wednesday, January 18 Dale Chihuly’s Blanket Cylinder

Join curatorial assistant Debrah Dunner for the Renwick’s monthly gallery talk. Dunner delivers on Dale Chihuly’s Blanket Cylinder Series. The artist was inspired by motifs on Indian trade blankets to create intricately patterned blown glass cylinders. Free. 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. Renwick Gallery, American Art Museum.

Thursday, January 19 Beat the Blues

Shake off your winter blues with singer Andrea Wood and her talented blues quintet on the Take 5! stage. Borrow a board game to play during the concert and enjoy printmaking demonstrations by artists from George Mason University. Free. 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Courtyard, American Art Museum

For a complete listing of Smithsonian events and exhibitions visit the goSmithsonian Visitors Guide. Additional reporting by Michelle Strange.

Join curators to learn about "Pair of Prickly Pairs" as part of a gallery talk. Photo courtesy of the Renwick Gallery

Monday, December 19 Fly Me To Mars

Author and illustrator Catherine Weitz’ award-winning children’s book Fly Me To Mars tells the story of wayward planet on a fantasy journey. Weitz, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, focuses on Mars geology in her research. Come meet Dr. Weitz and have your copy of the book signed in time for the holidays. Free. 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Air and Space Museum, at the entrance to the museum store.

Tuesday, December 20 Holiday Arts and Crafts

Join museum staff for a morning of arts and craft making with a holiday theme. Participants will have their own chance to create memorable ornaments with materials provided by the museum. Free; please call 202 633 4844 to make reservations. 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Anacostia Community Museum, program room.

Wednesday, December 21 American Craft Masterpieces

As part of the Renwick’s monthly gallery talks series, experts discuss the masterpieces in small, intimate groups. This month, join Rebecca Robinson as she provides insight into Jon Eric Riis’ Pair of Prickly Pairs. Riis is an internationally-known tapestry artist whose intricate works often incorporate precious materials such as metallic and silk threads. Pair of Prickly Pairs was acquired by the museum in 2001 and features an unusual cactus-like roughness on the surface of the fruits that was produced with the incorporation of glass seed beads into the work. Free. 12 p.m. Renwick Gallery, first floor lobby.

Thursday, December 22 Butterfly Pavilion

Come out of the chill of winter and discover a tropical oasis in the middle of the Mall. Located next to the “Butterflies + Plants: Partners in Evolution” exhibit at the Natural History Museum, the Butterfly Pavilion is home to hundreds of rare butterflies and exotic plants from all over the world. Tickets are required, and can be purchased in person at the Butterfly Pavilion Box Office or online. $6 for adults, $5.50 for seniors (60+), $5 for children (2 to 12), and $5 for members. Natural History Museum, 2nd Floor West, open 10:15 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily.

For a complete listing of Smithsonian events and exhibitions visit the goSmithsonian Visitors Guide. Additional reporting by Michelle Strange.

Beth Lipman's sculpture "Bancketje," is on view at the Renwick. Photo courtesy American Art Museum

With Thanksgiving Day at hand, the ATM team combed the collections for the some of the best feasts depicted in art. Visit the American Art Museum and its branch, the Renwick Gallery, to see these and other masterpieces of holiday food festivities.

1. Sioux Dog Feast: George Catlin was a self-taught artist who traveled the American West during the 1830s. This painting portrays a feast given by the Lakota people to visiting U.S. government representatives, likely observed at Fort Pierre in 1832. Recounting the event in his Letters and Notes Catlin wrote, “Near the foot of the flag-staff were placed in a row on the ground, six or eight kettles, with iron covers on them, shutting them tight, in which were prepared the viands for our voluptuous feast.”

2. Vegetable Dinner: This 1927 work, painted by artist Peter Blume at the precocious age of 21, depicts a pair of women—one, seated and smoking, the other, standing and chopping vegetables. “Blume was involved with a style called Purism, which emphasized exquisite contours and simplified shapes,” writes museum director Elizabeth Broun. “Still, there’s something in the way the knife slicing away a potato skin is poised against the vulnerable thumb, perhaps to cut more deeply. Blume could find a dark tension in this game of edges and surfaces.”

Doris Lee's 1935 "Thanksgiving," is held in the collections. Photo courtesy American Art Museum.

3. Thanksgiving: During her lifetime, Doris Lee was a popular mainstream artist whose work evoked Norman Rockwell and appeared in Life magazine. This 1935 painting provided a look back at the simpler domestic life many yearned for during the years of the Great Depression. The bustling kitchen is full of preparation for the annual feast, and although the work appears simple in terms of subject, it is filled with countless realistic details.

4. Archelous and Hercules: In ancient Greek myth, the god Archelous took the form of a bull during flood season and carved channels into the earth, while Hercules tore off his horn to create a cornucopia of plenty. Thomas Hart Benton’s 1947 oil painting adapts this legend as a parable for the American Midwest, where engineers worked to tame the Missouri River. The plentiful harvest spilling from the horn represents the future bumper crops farmers would enjoy as a result of this work.

5. Bancketje: This sculpture—named after the banquets often featured in 17th century Dutch still-life paintings—is a literal feast, but one already eaten. Contemporary glass artist Beth Lipman worked with 15 other artisans to create the extravagant installation, piling 400 pieces of hand-blown glass tableware, stemware, candlesticks and serving dishes atop an oak table. The 2003 piece manages to combine an initial impression of abundance with a subsequent awareness of emptiness and decay.

Jo Ann Gillula interviews Susan Ford Bales, left, daughter of President Gerald Ford, about what it was like to live in the White House. Photo by Bruce Guthrie.

Despite their age, the satin upholstered arm chairs, a perfectly coifed valance, shiny silver serving pieces and neatly set state china, now on display in the Renwick Gallery’s exhibition “‘Something of Splendor’: Decorative Arts from the White House,” are in immaculate condition. So much so, that it is hard to imagine real families and guests of the White House actually sitting on the furniture and eating off of the dinnerware. But the real dynamism of the White House, says White House curator William G. Allman, is in remembering that in addition to being a museum and office it is a home. “The White House embodies the story of how the presidents and their families live, work and entertain within its historic walls and among its historic furnishings,” says Allman.

For the 13-minute film At Home in the White House, featured in the exhibition, Jo Ann Gillula, chief of external affairs for the Smithsonian American Art Museum and its Renwick Gallery, interviewed several members of past first families. In it, Rosalynn Carter talks about how her daughter, Amy, particularly disliked a platter handpainted with a picture of a wild boar on it from the Rutherford B. Hayes administration. Lynda Bird Johnson Robb mentions how her mother would often say how she and President Lyndon Johnson ought to get their portraits done early, before they age. Tricia Nixon Cox speaks of how she had her wedding ceremony on the premises, and Susan Ford Bales recalls her senior prom, the only one ever to be held at the White House. Gillula especially enjoyed the funny stories Susan Ford Bales, daughter of former President Gerald Ford and First Lady Betty Ford, shared about living in the White House.

Just last week, Bales was invited back to the Renwick for a public interview in the gallery’s Grand Salon. In retrospect, Bales said that she wished she had paid more attention to the historic furnishings that surrounded her while living at the White House, but at the time, she admits she was more focused on “dates, grades, parties and what I was going to do for the weekends.” She was 17 years old, after all, when President Richard Nixon resigned and her father Gerald Ford took the highest office in 1974.

Bales had a leg up on her mother and three brothers, though, in knowing some of the public rooms of the White House. When the family had its first walk-through of the house with the curator, before moving in, she admits she acted like a know-it-all. The previous summer, she had a summer job selling White House Historical Association guide books in the residence.

The Fords had been living in a saltbox house in Alexandria, Virginia, with four bedrooms. Bales shared a bathroom with her older brothers, Michael, Jack and Steven. “I was so excited to have my own bathroom,” she recalls. “We really were simple people.” To make the private quarters their own, the president and first lady brought their own comfy chairs into what is traditionally the first lady’s bedroom. Bales says that her parents had always slept in the same room, and so decided to forgo the separate president and first lady bedrooms. They turned what was considered the president’s bedroom into an exercise room.

To Bales, the most “normal” room was the solarium on the third floor, facing the National Mall. With yellow chintz sofas, care of Mrs. Nixon, “you weren’t afraid to break anything,” says Bales. “It was like a normal living room. You felt comfortable in there.” On the other end of the spectrum, during the Ford administration there was a room on the White House’s second floor that had dark hunter green, velvet-covered walls. “It was a creepy room,” says Bales. “It had a warm, weird feeling about it.” As a child or teenager living in the White House, you expect it to have its mysteries, notes Bales. She poked around in drawers, and, on her very last night in the house, she slept in the Lincoln bedroom, where others had allegedly seen a ghost. While Bales tried to fall asleep, Betty Ford made ghoulish noises from the hallway. “That’s the kind of thing she did,” says Bales.

When Gillula brought up the senior prom, Bales looked to high school friends seated in the front rows of the audience, and said, playfully, “Yes, girls, should we talk about the prom?” Bales remembers the prom committee at the Holton Arms School in Bethesda, Maryland, asking her if it might be possible to have the prom at the White House in the spring of 1975. When she asked White House staff and her father, it was decided that yes, her classmates could have their prom there, as long as they, of course, footed the bill.

“Our dream was to have the Beach Boys,” says Bales, of the entertainment. “We thought they’d do it for free.” But they instead had two bands, called the Outer Space and the Sandcastle, playing in the East Room. It was interesting, says Bates, because unlike most proms, everybody in the class came to this one. “Anybody could get a date,” she jokes. “And all the parents wanted to be chaperones.” But, the class chose their favorite teachers to come instead.

Before the dance, Bales, her date, a 21-year-old “college boy,” and three other couples ate dinner while traveling down the Potomac River on Sequoia, the presidential yacht. “My parents were actually out of town in Egypt,” recalls Bales. “It was really convenient,” she adds, with a laugh. “Mother flew in my aunt to chaperone what was going on in the family quarters,” she adds.

The press, and the fish bowl-like lifestyle, was what Bales least liked about living in the White House. But the best part, she says, was having her father home for dinner more than he ever had been, thanks to Air Force One.

“People who have had the privilege to live there are very connected, in a different way,” says Bales, mentioning how former first ladies from both parties attended her mother’s funeral in July. “Politics really don’t matter once you live in this house,” she says.

In 1961, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy became the first to conceive of the White House as a museum. She established the White House Historical Association, a nonprofit responsible for funding, preserving and educating the public about the house’s historic furnishings and artwork, as well as the White House Office of the Curator, to act as the residence’s official historian. “‘Something of Splendor’: Decorative Arts from the White House,” open through May 6, 2012, honors the 50th anniversary of these two entities. In total, 95 objects from the White House’s permanent collection, some never before seen by the public, are on display.

* On Thursday, November 17, at noon at the Renwick Gallery, presidential historian and author Doug Wead will share entertaining stories about first families’ experiences in the White House from his book, All the President’s Children.

Shango’s most popular symbol, the double ax staff signifies the diety’s ability to reward the good and punish the bad. Photo courtesy of African Art; gift of Walt Disney World Co., a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company

Friday, June 3 Meet Shango, the Yoruba Diety of Lightning and Thunder

According to oral tradition, Shango, the 16th-century Yoruba warrior-king of Nigeria acquired a special “medicine.” He could bring forth lightning and rout his enemies on the battlefield. His powers enabled him to control much of southwestern Nigeria between the 17th and 19th centuries. Upon his death, Shango was deified and thereafter identified with thunderstorms, forces of nature that the Yoruba peoples  interpreted as a sign of supernatural justice. Shango worship, which spread beyond Nigeria to the Americas via the transatlantic slave trade, promotes the material and spiritual well-being of humanity and protects the powerless. Join Nigerian art historian Babatunde Lawal from Virginia Commonwealth University as he explores the changing interpretations of Shango symbols in Africa and the Americas. Free. 12 PM. Lecture Hall. African Art

Saturday June 4 Renwick Craft Invitational Family Day

Like to cut and paste the old fashion way? Gather at the Renwick for a family activity day making arts and crafts inspired by the work of the four artists on view. Docents will be on had to lead family-oriented tours through the exhibition History in the Making, featuring the work of stain glass artist Judith Schaechter, ceramicist Cliff Lee, silversmith Ubaldo Vitali and furniture maker Matthias Pliessnig. There will also be live music and a scavenger hunt.  Free. 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM. Renwick Gallery

Sunday, June 5 DC Jazz Festival at American Art Museum

The award-winning drummer and composer Nasar Abadey is the founder and leader of the band SUPERNOVA. Come out to here the group’s performance as part of DC Jazz Festival.  Abadey defines his music as “mult-D,” which he calls multi-dimensional and multi-directional—a broad eclectic mix of Classical African American music, that includes everything from traditional to bebop to free form.  Free. 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM. American Art Museum

For updates on all exhibitions and events, visit goSmithsonian.com