Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="420" caption="Heard Museum Gift Shop, by Daniel Greene, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] [caption id="" align="alignright" width="216" caption="Slide Carousel: Loading Slides into the Carousel 5, by rosefirerising, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] How does photography change the ways we look and learn about
Description: Among the many photos in the Archives' collections are images from the Panamanian island, Coiba, where former Smithsonian Secretary Alexander Wetmore, conducted ornithological research. We've featured some of these images on the blog before, and I always wondered about their captions, which mentioned that Coiba was a penal colony.
Description: A couple of years ago, in the process of curating Now is Then, an exhibition for the Newark Museum, I spent some time researching and thinking about the content, meaning and sequential lives of snapshots. Since their introduction in the late 19th century, inestimable numbers of those small, but powerful pictures have been made, looked at and saved—at least for a while.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Sorry, We're Open, by mofo, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] Back in May, I wrote about a controversy that surfaced in Europe after privacy advocates revealed that in the act of collecting photographic images for its Street View application, Google was also scooping up private data from the unsecured WiFi
Description: Starting in 1977, the National Air and Space Museum, with assistance from the International Frisbee Association, Wham-O Manufacturing Company, volunteer instructors from several states, and the Washington Area Frisbee Club, held their first Frisbee Festival on the National Mall.
Description: The Smithsonian African American Association was formed in 1989 and was an assembly of the Institution's employees who have organized to project a united voice, to have an impact upon pan-institutional policies that affect African Americans, and to convey these concerns to the Smithsonian Administration.
Description: The Buddhist Shrine Room is coming back better than ever with the re-opening of the Freer Sackler. [via Smithsonian Magazine]Your last chance to catch the major David Bowie retrospective is at the Brooklyn Museum March 2nd-July 15th, 2018. [via Art Newspaper]Get your gif on this month with DPLA's annual contest, GIF IT UP!Five previously-unpublished Kurt Vonnegut stories
Description: From the point in 1838 when the United States Congress accepted James Smithson’s bequest, it was recognized as a cultural resource, a public trust held by the federal government. Smithson had stipulated that the funds be used for an “establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” Being a cultural resource set aside for public use, the government bore the
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="313" caption="Georgia O'Keefe at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (HMSG) with Rene Magritte's sculpture "Delusions of Grandeur," 11 November 1977, by Richard Farrar, Photographic print, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 371 Box 2 Folder December 1977, Negative Number: 92-1789."][/caption] It is always fascinating