Description: [caption id="attachment_10342" align="alignleft" width="228" caption="Miss Willey Glover DeNis, (1879-1929), Smithsonian Institution Archives, SIA2008-0987."][/caption] At the Archives, we often run across images that have minimal information associated with them. Sometimes it’s a number or a name (usually incomplete) or a year. It is rare to find a beautifully complete
Description: [caption id="attachment_7261" align="alignleft" width="430" caption="Advertisement on Fifth Avenue in New York City, 2010, Photo courtesy of Marvin Heiferman."][/caption] You’ve probably noticed, in recent years, that in order to attract shoppers’ attention retail establishments have been filling both exterior and interior display spaces with big, colorful, and evocative
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="274" caption="Untitled, 1950/printed 1982, by Roy DeCarava, Gelatin silver print on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by Henry L. Milmore, 1992.15.3."][/caption] Last week American photography lost another of its grand masters. Roy DeCarava died at the age of 87 in New York on October 27th. He was an
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_9273,size=500,center]Have you ever heard of Smithsonian Park? If you are visiting the Smithsonian today, probably not. But if you had visited the Smithsonian in the 1850s, it would have been one of the first things you experienced.Smithsonian Park occupied the area between the Smithsonian Institution Building, or the Castle, and Downtown Washington,
Description: To celebrate the season, we have a series of posts looking at images of summer in the Smithsonian photo archives and collections. To start things off, Mary Savig, Archives Specialist at the Archives of American Art, describes how artists recharged in the summer months. Like eager vacationers everywhere, artists have long escaped to the beach on hot summer days. The shore
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_arc_391843,size=300,center]By the 1960s, Science Service had been acquiring photographs of scientists, obscure as well as famous, for over four decades. Portraits of Edison or Einstein were always in demand, but experience had also shown that bright, accomplished young people might someday be awarded a major prize or make a discovery deemed
Description: Digital strategist Effie Kapsalis was dedicated to building bridges between Smithsonian collections and audiences. In a Smithsonian career spanning nearly twenty years, Effie mobilized her colleagues to share more diverse stories, break down barriers to access, and fight for gender and racial equity in the cultural heritage sphere. Sadly, we lost Effie on December 11, 2022.
Description: Holiday family traditions are some of the things that people look forward to throughout the year. For my family, that would be the annual Christmas party. This is an unusual tradition in a Jewish family that emigrated from Russia at the turn of the 20th century.That's my Grandmother, Sally, on the lower left, her 4 brothers and sisters and her mother. It was her younger