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Americans love to visit museums. These houses of memorabilia enhance the lessons learned in school while allowing the opportunity to stand in their shadows. The displays bring alive the romance of a bygone era, and a good museum inspires each visitor to look with more enthusiasm toward the promises of the future. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C., is the one museum best equipped to provide all of these elements. Within the halls of the Smithsonian, visitors can see, under one roof, items like the Flyer, the actual first airplane that lifted off the sands at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and Friendship 7, the capsule that, less than one century later, carried astronaut John Glenn on his orbit around the earth. Meanwhile, young children point and scream with delight when spotting a sweater worn by Mister Rogers. Standing just a few feet away, their grandparents gaze with fond remembrance at the Charlie McCarthy doll and Archie Bunker's chair. The Smithsonian highlights a variety of remarkable accomplishments. Visitors report that they have been moved by a variety of emotions when viewing the exhibits. Some of the artifacts rekindle pleasant memories of childhood, while others bring a tear of sadness. Each of them, however, is a piece of thread that has become woven into the fabric of this great nation. In a sense, the Smithsonian Institution is a reflection of the real United States of America, boldly showing America for what it really is--far from being perfect, yet determined to remain a nation that perpetuates the state of becoming. The stories in Echoes from the Smithsonian: America's History Brought to Life reveal both the triumphs and foibles of this great land.They will help readers appreciate all the more the devotion and accomplishments of those dedicated men and women who gave their time, their talent, and sometimes their lives in order to create and preserve this experiment Americans call a democracy.
Vols. for Apr. 1975- include Ohio bicentennial news.
From the fluttering fabric of a tent, to the blurred motion of the potter’s wheel, to the rhythm of a horse puppet’s wooden hooves—these scenes make up a set of mid-1980s art exhibitions as part of the U.S. Festival of India. The festival was conceived at a meeting between Indira Gandhi and Ronald Reagan to strengthen relations between the two countries at a time of late Cold War tensions and global economic change, when America’s image of India was as a place of desperate poverty and spectacular fantasy. Displaying Time unpacks the intimate, small-scale durations of time at work in the gallery from the transformation of clay into ceramic to the one-on-one, personal encounters between museum visitors and artists. Using extensive archival research and interviews with artists, curators, diplomats, and visitors, Rebecca Brown analyzes a selection of museum shows that were part of the Festival of India to unfurl new exhibitionary modes: the time of transformation, of interruption, of potential and the future, as well as the contemporary and the now.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition held Sept. 30, 2010-Jan. 16, 2011, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Feb. 26-July 31, 2011, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and at two other institutions at later dates.
Why is the Smithsonian more than the "Nation's Attic?" Or more than a museum complex? As Wilton S. Dillon shows, the Smithsonian came to be the institution we know today under the twenty-year leadership of "Sun King" S. Dillon Ripley.Ripley aspired to reinvent the Smithsonian as a great university with museums. Although little understood by the public at large, it began as a basic research center. The Smithsonian remains a key contributor to the world of higher learning and functions diplomatically as the ministry of culture for the United States. Dillon provides backstage insights into Ripley's quest for the wholeness of knowledge. He describes how he inspired its role as a "theater of ideas as well as artifacts." Under his tutelage, the National Mall became a playground for world intelligentsia, an "intellectual free trade zone" in the shadow of the nation's political capital.Dillon reminds us that interdisciplinary, international Smithsonian symposia foreshadowed twenty-first-century issues and trends. His descriptions of the educational rewards of balancing tradition with the avant-garde are inspiring. As Dillon reminds us, Ripley's twenty-year reign may well have helped spark the waning embers of the Enlightenment.
Echoes of Elvis is a collection of papers examining how the Elvis' story and widespread fame fit into the greater framework of American culture.
Since it was first published in 2006, Riches, Rivals and Radicals has been the go-to text for introductory museum studies courses. It is also of great value to professionals as well as museum lovers who want to learn the stories behind how and why these institutions have evolved since the day the first mastodon bones, royal portraits and botanical specimens entered their halls. For this third edition, Marjorie Schwarzer has mined new resources, previously unavailable archives and contemporary trends to provide a fresh look at the challenges and innovations that have shaped museums in the United States. Schwarzer argues that museums are fundamentally optimistic institutions. They build and preserve some of the nation’s most extraordinary architecture. They showcase the beauty and promise of new scientific discoveries, historical breakthroughs and artistic creation. They provide places of inspiration and repose. At the same time, museums have succeeded in exposing some of the nation’s most painful legacies – racism, inequity, violence – as they strive to be places for healing and reckoning. This too, one could argue, is an act of optimism, for it expresses the hope that museum visitors will gain empathy and understanding from the evidence of others’ struggles. Schwarzer shows us how museums are rooted in a contentious history tied to social, technological and economic trends and ultimately changing ideas of what it means to be a citizen. Along the way we meet some notorious and eccentric characters including business tycoons, architects, collectors, designers, politicians, political activists and progressive educators, all of whom have exerted their influence on what is a complex yet nonetheless enduring institution. Major additions since the last edition include material on digital curation, emergent exhibitions about civil rights, immersive museum environments, continuing efforts to diversify the field, how museums' role in our increasingly digital society, and a new foreword by American Alliance of Museums President and CEO Laura L. Lott. Museums new to this edition include the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. Beautifully written and lavishly illustrated, the third edition of this accessible, award-winning book brings the reader up to date on the stories behind the people and events that have transformed America’s museums from their beginnings into today’s vibrant cultural institutions.
Although the Smithsonian Institution has grown to be over a hundred years old, no full length account of its various collections and fascinating activities had ever been written before Mr. True put them down here in 1950. Founded through a generous bequest by a lonely Englishman who had never visited this country, The Smithsonian, often identified with its headquarters in the quaint Norman castle on the Mall in Washington D.C., also includes the United States National Museum—now called the National Museum of Natural History—with its collection of natural history and American historical treasures, the National Gallery of Art, with its outstanding collection of paintings, prints and sculpture, the Freer Gallery of Art, the National Air Museum—now called the National Air and Space Museum. Mr. True sets forth a biography that covers the treasures of the Smithsonian in the Fifties, while also illuminating the organization of the Smithsonian museums in the Fifties; some things have remained remarkably unchanged over the intervening years, while others are drastically different. Mr. True holds up the Smithsonian Institute as the national treasure it is, one whose value is incalculable.