As part of the ongoing celebration of Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday (our 16th President was born February 12th, 1809), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) invites you to play Artful Abe, an online game that connects outdoor sculptures with works at the Museum. Players begin by selecting a sculpture from a map, and then follow clues to find works at the Museum. For example, selecting the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. sends you on a scavenger hunt to find a portrait of Marian Anderson, who sang on the steps of Memorial before an audience of seventy-five thousand people, after she was barred by the Daughters of the American Revolution from performing in Washington's Constitution Hall. A limitation of the game is that visitors can only choose works that have been pre-selected by curators at SAAM - no selecting your own favorite Lincoln in your own state. As a partial remedy for this, the Museum has created the Artful Abe Flickr Pool ( http://www.flickr.com/groups/artfulabe/ ), where game players can upload additional Lincoln artworks that they have discovered, closer to their homes.
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