Description: Long ago and far away, before gray hairs and creaky knees, before history became my passion, I was an undergraduate physics major. Physics seemed fascinating and beautiful, if difficult. Later, after career paths led into history and science policy, I learned that physics, however elegant, did not reside in a cultural vacuum. Its people and discoveries coexisted with
Description: Being away from the office for over a year has given us a lot of opportunity to think about what workflows will look like once we are able to return to our collections, especially for conservation and digitization.
Description: A selection of posters from programs and exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (formerly National Collection of Fine Arts and National Museum of American Art) and Renwick Gallery.
Description: The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) has undergone many name changes over the years. One of these – the National Collection of Fine Arts (NCFA) – was in use from 1937 to 1980. During this time, the NCFA underwent several exciting changes. After years of being housed in multiple locations and several failed attempts to build a permanent building, the collection moved to
Description: Opening on April 6, 2018, A box of ten photographs highlights the portfolio of Diane Arbus, an American photographer known for her black-and-white images of marginalized individuals, including the mentally ill, circus performers, and transgender people. The exhibition, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) until January 21, 2019, traces the history of Arbus's
Description: [view:sia_slideshow==71908]By the late 1960s, curators at the National Museum of History and Technology (NMHT), now the National Museum of American History, were focusing on how to present aspects of the American experience to visitors of the museum in different ways. Instead of using "sterile techniques which have too frequently given visitors the false impression that all
Description: Why would a fashion video appear on an environmental blog? That’s the question I found myself asking while performing web quality assurance (aka web QA) on the blog for the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), which has more to do with fish than it does with fashion. As an intern in the Digital Services Division at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, my work in