Exhibit at Smithsonian American Art Museum will include showing of “It's a Wonderful Life”

Mary Owen will introduce a special screening of “It's a Wonderful Life” for the Smithsonian American Art Museum on Thursday, April 14. It is one of three movies chosen to accompany the exhibit, “To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America,” showing March 11 - September 5, 2011.

During the turbulent 1940s, artist George Ault (1891-1948) created precise yet eerie pictures—works of art that have come to be seen, following his death, as some of the most original paintings made in America in those years. The beautiful geometries of Ault’s paintings make personal worlds of clarity and composure to offset a real world he felt was in crisis.