Description: Ruth B. MacManus and Gertrude Brown bonded over their heavy workloads and shared experiences as working women in the Great Depression. Together, they helped improve a publication that does not bear their names: the Smithsonian Scientific Series.
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