Museum assignment For our museum paper assignment, I chose to do my writing on a piece of American art. It’s a painting by Charles Ethan Porter called Still Life, this painting is up for display at the San Antonio Museum of Art. The painting is oil on canvas with the dimensions of h. 13 in. (33.0 cm); w. 20 in. (50.8 cm) “Charles Ethan Porter was an American still life painter and among relatively few African Americans of the nineteenth and early 20th century to work as a professional artist. A student at the National Academy of Design in New York City, he was one of the first African Americans to exhibit there. He attracted the notice of painter Frederic Edwin Church and writer Mark Twain, who encouraged his career and study in Paris.”