Description: In 1864, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth sparked people’s imagination, but have you heard that before the novel was published, the Smithsonian attempted a journey of its own.
Description: “Are you arty or hearty?” As family legend has it, this hilarious question was asked of one of our family’s old friends upon his arrival at Jesus College, Oxford University in 1932 as a Rhodes Scholar. Well, as the story goes, it turns out that he was hearty and intellectually gifted (physics). And, the same can be said of lots of Smithsonian employees.
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="314" caption="The Amb. Richard B. Parker Photographs contains 200 black and white prints, 481 black and white negatives, and two black and white contact sheets of Islamic monuments in Algeria, Cairo, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Morocco, and Spain, 1965-1979, by Richard Bordeaux Parker, Unknown medium, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M.