Description: As the Smithsonian geared up to celebrate its 175th anniversary, the Libraries and Archives decided to revisit the online exhibition From Smithsonian to Smithsonian, created a quarter of a century ago. Today, on the Smithsonian’s birthday, we are pleased to celebrate the launch of a new, refreshed and greatly expanded web exhibition, Smithson to Smithsonian.
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_8629,size=350,left]C. Malcolm Watkins was an unlikely revolutionary; nevertheless, he would lead a vanguard of curators who brought African American history into the Smithsonian in the 1960s and 1970s. C. Malcolm Watkins, Smithsonian curator and cultural historian, brought African American history into the Smithsonian in the 1960s and 1970s. Attentive
Description: On May 16, 1929, an exhibition of American Negro Artists opened on the ground floor of the Smithsonian’s US National Museum building. The exhibition featured fifty-one works by twenty-seven black sculptors and painters who won a juried competition sponsored by the Harmon Foundation.1Though the work selected remained distant from the most radical new work being created by
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_8206,size=350,right]Born around 1815, James Thomas Gant was one of twelve children born to free parents on a plantation a few miles northeast of the Washington DC-line.1 As a free black man who lived through nearly the entire nineteenth century, he would see the Civil War, the destruction of slavery, the rise and fall of an all-too-brief period of
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_8804,size=350,right]Louise Daniel Hutchinson set out on the path of her life’s work from a young age, growing up among DC’s African American intellectual elite in a family that imbued her with a passion for justice and a love of community. Those connections and commitments accompanied her throughout a long and influential career at the Smithsonian.
Description: Jeannine Smith Clark began forty seven years of involvement with the Smithsonian working as a volunteer docent at the National Museum of Natural History in 1968. Since then, she has served on the influential Smithsonian Women’s Committee and was appointed to the Board of Regents, where she served from 1983 to 1994. Jeannine Smith Clark worked with the Smithsonian for 47 years