WASHINGTON, DC.- The Smithsonian announced that world-famous artist LeRoy Neiman has donated his personal archives to the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. The artist’s papers consist of 90 boxes of correspondence, images and records of his commissions and business transactions and provide insight into his extensive career. The collection contains project files on his many commissioned portraits of celebrities in the world of sports and entertainment such as Muhammad Ali, Bill Bradley, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Sylvester Stallone and others, as well as Neiman exhibitions, promotions, publications and philanthropic work. There are also audio and video recordings of interviews and events that feature Neiman.

“These documents will give scholars in the fields of art history and American culture a rich source of materials with which to study Neiman’s singular role and distinguished contributions to American art for more than half a century,” said Richard Wattenmaker, director of the Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small will present Neiman with a commemorative gift—a piece of the mineral smithsonite named for the Institution’s benefactor who discovered it—at a luncheon at the National Museum of American History that will be attended by the museum’s director and curators in sports, jazz and popular culture.

LeRoy Neiman is best known for his colorful, energetic paintings of sporting events and leisure activities or, as he puts it, “the good life.” Neiman also is widely known for his evocative depictions of major figures of American jazz and popular music. Beginning in the mid 1950s and continuing for more than a decade, Neiman produced sketches and paintings for Playboy magazine.

He was the first and only official on-camera artist for ABC-TV at the Olympics in Munich (1972) and Montreal (1976), and he covered several other Olympic Games as an official artist. He was also the first artist to create live, on-camera computer art while covering the 1978 Super Bowl in New Orleans for CBS-TV. In 1997, he was selected as the first official artist of the Kentucky Derby.

Neiman’s artistic interests range far and wide. As a painter, printmaker, and author, his subjects have included Parisian cafés, African safaris, well-known restaurants, urban street scenes, the opera, political figures, jazz musicians, entertainers, stage and screen stars and international stock exchanges. Some of his original works of art are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hermitage in Russia.

Neiman has donated scores of his artworks to many charitable causes and organizations. Through his work with the Good Tidings Foundation, two LeRoy Neiman Art Centers for Youth have been built in elementary schools in California. In 1995, he gave the School of Arts at Columbia University in New York an endowment of $6 million to create the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, which is dedicated to the study of fine art printmaking and the development of new methods of printmaking and includes a scholarship program. A 1998 donation established the LeRoy Neiman Center for the Study of American Culture and Society at UCLA.