The Smithsonian Institution has an awesome online archive of old photographs of artists, many in their studios, where sculptors pose midway through work and painters cradle their palettes at their easels. Some have their clothes stained with paint, others obviously spruced up for the portrait occasion. Some are comfortable and confident, others somewhat awkward. Basically, like the cluttered studios, artists haven’t changed.
Smithsonian
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Contract Workers at Smithsonian Protest Low Wages
Some 50 food service workers at the Smithsonian museums went on strike yesterday, in protest of their less-than-livable wages, but the institution tried to spin the story.
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Facing Budget Cuts, Smithsonian Cuts Exhibitions and Closes Galleries
Earlier this week, officials with the Smithsonian Institution gave testimony on the impact of federal budget cuts from sequestration. The cuts will force the Smithsonian Institution to not just cancel or put on hold some upcoming exhibitions, but, starting May 1, to temporarily close off galleries throughout the year as well.
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An Ancient Symbol of Tolerance Goes on Its First American Tour
Back in the ancient world, whole clusters of ceremonial objects would be buried at a specific points in temple foundations, with a theorized reason being that these ritualistic items were believed to keep the buildings from ruin. While this didn’t quite work in the longterm, as temples are as structurally fragile as everything else over the centuries, they did turn into inadvertent time capsules. One particular foundation deposit in Babylon contained an artifact that has become as significant symbolically as it is as a relic of the ancient world. And it’s now on its first American tour.
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BIG Architects to Design LEGO Museum and Smithsonian Master Plan
Bjarke Ingels Group (or BIG), the Danish architecture firm helmed by its namesake, is getting even bigger. New plans to create a LEGO museum and develop the master plan for the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., signal that the buzzed-about firm is on the cusp of becoming the world’s next big starchitecture outlet.
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Smithsonian American Art Museum Acquires the Life’s Work of an Imaginary Soul Singer
Between 1968 and 1977, Mingering Mike released around 50 albums, each with its own hand-drawn album art, and played sold-out shows around the world. Yet if you haven’t heard of the prolific soul and funk singer, it’s because he was entirely fictional, but the art was real and has just been acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
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The Visual Memory of Ai Weiwei’s Survey at the Hirshhorn Museum
Ai Weiwei’s survey at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC ended this past Sunday, and on that last day clusters of visitors gathered around each piece with camera phones out in documentation, especially at the end piece “Cube Light.” The highly photogenic glimmering box of glass crystals from his Chandelier series of large-scale installations is a conceptual monolith, and seems to unintentionally echo the flash of light from his own camera phone in his famous 2009 arrest photo displayed in a gallery below. It was that story of his own championing of documentation, especially through social media, that made the wandering camera phone mob seem like a component of the exhibition, a way for his art to fly out from the walls of the museum through digital waves while he himself is still unable to leave China.
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Smithsonian’s Art of Video Games to Tour Across the U.S.
If there was ever any doubt that video games are one of our era’s strongest forms of art (I’m looking at you, Roger Ebert), the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibition The Art of Video Games should have erased them. The mammoth exhibition featured over 80 games, with playable consoles, concept art, and video footage. Now, the show is touring across the United States in a victory lap through nine cities.
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Political Pressure Censors Artwork And Creates Unexpected Spectacle
I feel naïve to have thought that art offered one of the only scared spaces to be freely expressive. Two weeks ago, I wrote a post that attempted to diplomatically depict the controversial saga that has unfolded over artist Brett Murray’s “The Spear”, a Communist propaganda style portrayal of South African president Jacob Zuma with his penis hanging out from his zipper.
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When Controversy and Failure Become Art
In the exhibition Canceled: Alternative Manifestations and Productive Failures at the Center for Book Arts, the documents, language and narrative of controversy, censorship and failure become a new form of work to consider.
Posted inOpinion
Smithsonian Channel Unveils a Great New iPad App
LOS ANGELES — New in the Apple Store this month is the Smithsonian Channel’s iPad app, which lets you play videos from the Channel’s extensive programming. It includes short clips for a quick burst of knowledge during the day, as well as longer documentaries for an extended viewing.
Posted inOpinion
The Problems With the Smithsonian’s New Civil Rights History Through Art
Starting with the landmark Plessy v Ferguson case of 1896 and continuing until the 2009 inauguration of the first US President with African heritage, the Smithsonian has launched Oh Freedom! Teaching African American Civil Rights through American Art at the Smithsonian. But why so few women and where are the LGBT people?
