Alec Baldwin and his wife Hilaria Thomas, the popular New York yoga instructor, are set to co-chair “Some Enlightened Evening,” a gala event on October 17 in support of “Yoga: The Art of Transformation,” the Smithsonian’s first exhibition on the visual history of Yoga. (more…)
On Tuesday the Smithsonian Institution announced that Oprah Winfrey — she of “O, the Oprah Magazine,” Oprah’s Book Club, the Oprah Winfrey Network, and “The Oprah Winfrey Show” — is donating $12 million to the forthcoming National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is due to open near the Washington Monument in 2015. Combined with her $1 million donation in 2007, this makes her the largest donor to the institution. (more…)
While Western art and anthropological institutions have long plundered human remains from colonized countries under questionable circumstances in support of ”scientific” theories of racial superiority, many institutions worldwide have begun to take reparative steps for the return of such objects. The New York Times’s Doreen Carvajal has outlined recent curatorial practices that rethink what types of human remains should and should not be exhibited, as well as owned by museums. (more…)
The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) has received an enormous and unconventional donation: A slave cabin from the Pines Plantation on South Carolina’s Edisto Island that dates back to the first half of the 19th century. The Edisto Island Historic Preservation Society donated the small weatherboard cabin to the museum after receiving it from the former plantation’s current owners. (more…)
The Smithsonian Institute’s Archives of American Art (AAA) has appointed Kate Haw, currently the National Building Museum’s (NBM) vice president for development, to be its new director, a post she’ll officially assume on May 27. She’ll be taking over from Liza Kirwin, who has been serving as the AAA’s director since the departure of John W. Smith in 2011 after five years on the job. (more…)
The Smithsonian Institute has announced that the Renwick Gallery, which has housed its collection of American decorative arts and crafts since 1972, will close in early 2014 to undergo a round of major renovations whose details are still being hammered out. The renovation will see the Renwick reopen in 2016 following its first major renovation in 40 years. (more…)
The popular “Art of Video Games” exhibition that attracted more than a half-million visitors to the Smithsonian last year opens today at the latest stop on its tour, Seattle’s EMP Museum. Spanning 40 years, the show exhibits 80 video games that were selected by curator Chris Melissinos from a crowd-sourced list of more than 200 nominees.
Come April the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery will have a new director, Kim Sajet, who has been at the helm of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) since 2007, prior to which she served as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’s deputy director and vice president for seven years, the Washington Post reports. From 1998 to 2001 she was also the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s director of corporate relations. (more…)
Just how much has the museum-going experience changed over the years? That’s what the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art — a collection of artists’ journals, sketchbooks, correspondence, and other printed and paper ephemera — set out to illustrate in its new exhibition, “A Day at the Museum,” which opened earlier this month at the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery. (more…)
As part of its traveling presentation of Romare Bearden’s 1977 collage series “A Black Odyssey” — a re-imagining of Homer’s “Odyssey” inspired by the Great Migration — which just ended its run in North Carolina and moves to Tennessee’s Memphis Brooks Museum of Art next, the Smithsonian commissioned the iPad app “Black Odyssey Remixes.” It allows users to rearrange the collage elements from the seminal series to their liking. (more…)
