museums

Study for "Portrait of Van Gogh" V (1957) by Francis Bacon. Image courtesy of the Hirshhorn.
His thick, impasto brush strokes—the likes of which got him kicked out of art class—and brilliant colors are part of Vincent van Gogh’s signature style. Perhaps equally famous to his groundbreaking artworks is the artist’s lifelong struggle with inner demons that led to erratic displays of self-destructive behavior such as cutting off his left earlobe and shooting himself in the chest. The latter incident ended up costing him his life and on this day in 1890, the artist died from his wounds.
Though under-appreciated by his contemporaries—the man only sold one painting in his lifetime—critics and lay art lovers alike have since gone gaga for van Gogh. The images of daisies, irises, night scenes illuminated by stars and street lamps have been subject to both serious study and mass marketing to the point where, 120 years after his death, van Gogh is a mainstay in our collective consciousness. Doubt me? Search Calendars.com and see how many 2011 calendars are exclusively sporting his artworks.
You can also experience van Gogh by way of the Smithsonian. The Cooper Hewitt’s collections sport a pen and ink drawing done by the artist while he was living in Arles, France. (Unfortunately, due to rights restrictions, we can’t use the image here on the blog, but you can see it online at the Cooper Hewitt’s site here.) And though the Hirshhorn doesn’t have any canvases by the master himself, they do have a series of paintings by Irish painter Francis Bacon, who strove to emulate van Gogh’s style. (As evidenced in the painting study above.) Smithsonian magazine has also run several features that cover different aspect’s of the artist’s life and work,  from taking a close look at his nighttime paintings (here), to his correspondence with a young, up-and coming artist (here), to recounting his tumultuous final days (here).
I’d feel a mite remiss if I didn’t point you in a few non-SI directions to get to know van Gogh a bit better. In 2008, Columbia University professor and art historian Simon Schama produced a riveting documentary miniseries that focused on the lives of six spectacular artists, one of which being van Gogh. He’s played here by Lord of the Rings alumnus Andy Serkis, the actor responsible for Gollum for those not in the know.) If you’re looking for a more dramatic treatment, check out the 1956 biopic Lust for Life. Directed by Vincente Minelli and starring a pre-Spartacus Kirk Douglass in the lead, it should give you a good impression of van Gogh’s life and work.

Week 3 of Summer Drop-in Days was filled with TV characters, animals, cake and ice cream, and cool dance moves. An interesting mix of entertainment, right? Well that's how we like our Drop-in Days- full of variety! This week is no different. Today pirates will be walking the plank, and tomorrow we will be taking the Gentle Giant Staircase Challenge! Come on over and experience it firsthand! If you couldn't make it to our Drop-in Days last week, then here is what you missed!On Thursday our favorite furry pal, Ruff from FETCH! with Ruff Ruffman, came to visit us! Throughout the day, Ruff bopped down in The Wild Place to take pictures and hand out awesome stickers, bookmarks, and tattoos! He loved meeting his biggest fans, like Hillary and Ashley Browne (left)- some of them even made him cool crafts at our Crazy Concoction Station (right), where we made some coffee ground fossils and puff paint creations! After you finished up your crafts, you could've headed over to the gazebo for some tasty Ruff Ruffman cake. I have to admit that I had a big piece my self...it was delicious! And what goes better with cake than ice cream? The Mix 104.1 Street Team (left) was nice enough to help us out. They handed out delicious Turkey Hill ice cream to everyone. It was the perfect way to cool off in the summer heat! If you missed out on the ice cream, then you can come next Friday, August 6th for another scoop from Mix 104.1!It was a great day at the Museum: our favorite PBS friend, Ruff Ruffman, came over, we got to make some kooky crafts, and we were able to satisfy our sweet tooth with cake and ice cream! What more can you ask for?! You are probably thinking "another awesome Drop-in Day like this one!" Well, we've got you covered. Don't miss Ruff on our last Drop-in Day of the summer. On August 27th he will be back to wrap up another great summer at the Museum!So after indulging in (maybe a little too much!) cake and ice cream, we definitely needed to work it off at our next Drop-in Day! On Friday we busted some funky moves with Nicole, a dancer who trained at the Boston Ballet School! She showed us fun games that got all of our body parts to bend and move. She also taught us some awesome party dances, like the Macarena and the Funky Chicken. I will definitely be breaking those moves out at the next dance party that I go to!If you braved the rain, then you got to see Matt from Animal World Experience (right) show us how animals move during Locomotion Commotion. He brought along a snake, possum, rabbit, and other wiggly creatures to teach us why these animals move the way they do. Matt's different spin on an animal show made it a huge hit with our visitors. If you love animals, then you are in luck! We still have a few more Drop-in Days in August that will be a hit for animal lovers. Make sure to check out Dog Days of Summer II and Miss Candy's Petting Zoo for more animal fun!We had another exciting week at the Museum. One day we met our favorite TV character and the next we learned some new dance moves! There's always something fun happening at our Drop-in Days. Be sure to check out our August Drop-in Day schedule to see what we have planned for next month!-Ashley BalernaPublic Relations Intern, The Children's Museum in Easton

John Mather's Nobel Prize medal was returned to its recipient. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.
Earlier this year, astronaut Piers Sellers contacted Nobel-Prize-winning physicist John Mather to see whether or not he would be interested in lending his 2006 medal to the space shuttle Atlantis for their upcoming trip to the International Space Station.
Mather’s winning work involved measuring “cosmic background microwave radiation” using the COBE satellite launched by NASA in 1989. Mather and his partner, George Smoot, found that the spectrum of the radiation measured matched that predicted to result from the Big Bang, confirming the validity of this theory of the inception of the universe.
Upon receiving the medal, Mather requested that three replicas be made for his colleagues at NASA and the Air and Space Museum. In a process unknown to those unlucky folk not to have won a Nobel Prize, the Nobel committee produces replicas for winners that are not identical to the original medal, but are still valuable and genuine.
Thrilled by Sellers’ idea, Mather contacted the museum, which had the only replica of the Nobel Prize medal not ensconced in thick plastic; such materials could potentially release harmful fumes inside the enclosed space shuttle. Although at the time the museum staff were suffering through the infamous Washington, D.C. Snowpocalypse of 2010, they were able to access the medal and send it off to Sellers, embedded in a box approximately the size of a refrigerator. After briefly contemplating several options for what to do with such a large object in the space shuttle (put a “hood” on it? Bust the medal out with a hammer?), the medal, it’s oversized carrying case, and Sellers — resigned to find room for the box– were off to space.
John Mather’s 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics medal isn’t the only one that’s been on an epic journey. Many medals have crossed multiple oceans and continents. German scientists James Franck and Max von Laue even dissolved their medals in nitro-hydrochloric acid to prevent them from being confiscated by the Nazis during World War II. (After the war, Danish physicist Niels Bohr extracted the gold from the solution and the medals were recast.)
But while von Laue and Franck’s medals may have lived through two incarnations, Mather’s medal is the first to have traveled beyond the terrestrial realm and into the reaches of outer space.
Sellers returned the replica to Mather in a presentation Tuesday at the National Air and Space Museum downtown. Standing before a large crowd, Mather recounted his first visit to the museum, when he “felt tears rolling down” his face at the sight of such innovative exploration and discovery.
“The lives of museum objects don’t end when they get to the museum,” said Margaret Weitekamp, a curator in the Division of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum. “They continue as they are rebuilt or restored…or even as they’re flown into space.”  Only time will tell where Mather’s Nobel medal may shove off to next; but for now, we’ll be content to know that it’s home safe in the collections of the Smithsonian.

So, now that you know Rossetti’s Silence is on view for a limited time in the Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court, let’s enhance your visit by getting to know the artist, his model, and the story behind this late Victorian masterpiece.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was born in London, where he attended Henry Sass’s Drawing Academy and the Antique School of the Royal Academy. Bored with the Academy’s traditional program, he joined the progressive studios of Ford Madox Brown and later William Holman Hunt. In September 1848 Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais challenged the Royal Academy’s hold on young artists by founding the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters seeking to revive the simplicity and realism of early Italian Renaissance art. Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite pictures were criticized for their crude design, proof according to critics of the painter’s lack of technical training. Fearing future censure, Rossetti vowed to never exhibit publicly in London again, and by 1852 the original Brotherhood had ceased to exist.
In the 1860s, while painting his first pictures of single female figures, Rossetti fell under the spell of Titian, Palma Vecchio, and the great Venetian masters of voluptuous female flesh. His brushstrokes broadened, replacing what he had described as the “stipple in the flesh” of his earlier, painstakingly detailed Pre-Raphaelite compositions. His head-and-shoulders portraits in chalk like Silence sold well, and by 1870 he was devoting himself almost entirely to representations of the ideal woman, often in the form of Jane Morris. Rossetti’s later works were embraced by the Symbolist painters, who shared his interest in painting dreamy, introspective women lost in silent meditation and mystical inwardness.

Portraits of Jane Morris (1839-1914), by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and J. R. Parsons, From an album of photographs posed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1863. V&A 1738 & 1741-1939.
Jane Burden Morris (1839-1914), the face of Silence, inspired numerous works by Rossetti and his friends, among them the painter-poet William Morris whom she would marry in 1859. Jane was a remarkable beauty, destined to play a major role in Rossetti’s idealized and symbolic portraits of “stunners”—beautiful women shown at close range in often exotic settings.  In 1869, the American writer Henry James described her as having “a thin pale face, a pair of strange, sad, deep, dark Swinburnish eyes [a reference to the poems of the late Victorian writer Algernon Charles Swinburne], with great thick black oblique brows, joined in the middle and tucking themselves away under her hair.” Jane, the daughter of a humble stableman, was discovered by Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones in an Oxford theater. Thanks to her captivating looks, she was spared a life of poverty and a future in domestic service. Through Morris she was educated privately, mastering French and Italian as well as the piano.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (British, 1828-1882). Silence, 1870. Dry pigment (pastel or chalk) on two sheets of joined wove paper, 41 7/8 x 30 3/8 in. (106.4 x 77.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Luke Vincent Lockwood, 46.188
In Silence, Rossetti captures Jane’s beauty as well as her character; she was, according to contemporary accounts, an unusually silent woman.

In August, the Danish Initiative for Science, Society and Policy (ISSP) will arrange a ‘discussion of the broader implications of living technology’ that might be interesting to anyone who thinks the boundary between inorganic and organic, living and dead, or technology and humans is exciting. Or to anyone who want to get a glimpse of the future of science and medicine, maybe?
As the organisers write on their webpage:
Today, genetically modified organisms are designed and used in the laboratory to allow pharmaceuticals to be synthesized with precision in large quantities; autonomously working robots acting on the same principles thought to underlie insect behavior are increasingly introduced not only in industrial production but also healthcare; and adaptive network traffic controllers are currently being developed to control the flow of the ‘arteries’ of working life.
I first wondered at the scale of this technology — is this ‘just’ another word for nano-technology or are we talking robots of the more impressive kind (in terms of size)? And is it then robots like the robotic seal used for Alzheimer’s patients or something more science fiction-like, as the picture above, taken from the ISSP website, implies? The answer, according to ISSP, is that it is all of this:
Three examples of living technology are synthetic biology attempts to make living systems from scratch in the laboratory, ICT systems exhibiting collective and swarm intelligence distributed across the world wide web, and robots currently cleaning our households, providing companions for the autistic, and the like.
The preliminary programme for the discussion does not seem to emphasise healthcare, though the need for “thinking through the implications” of this technology looks to me to be particularly important in this field. The concept of living technology might appear to be a contradiction in terms (just like ‘synthetic biology‘), but maybe it will become the next big thing in healthcare.

Everett Raymond Kinstler's portrait of Norman Y. Mineta is now on display in the National Portrait Gallery
“There are times when you think about your life in reflection.” Norman Y. Mineta stood before a group of family, friends, former colleagues and Smithsonian staffers Monday evening as his soft eyes gazed at his own likeness sitting across the podium in a regal gold frame. “I don’t know if you should be proud to be hanged, but there’s no question that I’m proud to be hanging in the National Portrait Gallery.”
Mineta—formerly secretary of commerce under Bill Clinton and secretary of transportation under George W. Bush—was painted by New York artist Everett Raymond Kinstler, who has more than 80 portraits already in the Portrait Gallery’s collection, including Yo Yo Ma, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Katharine Hepburn. The portrait was unveiled and hung Monday evening, in a program that included remarks by museum staff, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program that gifted the portrait to the Portrait Gallery, and Mineta himself.
Mineta’s is a different American story from most. Having been sent to a Japanese internment camp as a child during World War II, he worked his way up through the ranks of state and federal government. Richard Kurin, Under Secretary for History, Art and Culture at the Smithsonian, praised Mineta as “a true public servant, who instead of becoming embittered by his experiences, learned from them, worked hard and accomplished much.” Kurin read a letter from President Barack Obama, calling “Norm” the “consummate public servant.”
Mineta recounted stories of his siblings facing discrimination when they were younger—of his sister, who wanted to be a school teacher but was told nobody would hire her because of her Japanese heritage—and of his brother, whose draft card in 1942 was marked by the designation “4C,” or “enemy alien.”
But despite what may have been a painful past, Mineta emphasized the positive influences he received throughout his life. “Through these kinds of experiences, you get mentored,” he said. “I’m privileged to be standing on the shoulders of giants of the past. . .I hope to play a small role in encouraging Asian Pacific Americans to go up the ladder of success, and to pull someone else up with them.”
The portrait depicts Mineta, arms folded, in a dark suit with an American flag pinned to his lapel. He stands before an Asian screen, and a small sculpture sits in the lower right-hand corner of the canvas. Kinstler, the artist, said he does not believe in “gimmicks,” but in “making use of objects that show something about the character of the subject.” Because the portrait was social rather than political (now that Mineta is no longer a government official), Kinstler felt justified in using vibrant colors for the background and small props to bring a “sense of life” to the painting.
As the portrait was hung in the hall of the museum, Mineta and Kinstler—now friendly after four sittings for the portrait—feigned clamoring for attention from the cameras, one white-haired man leaping boyishly in front of the other. I recall Kurin’s words from earlier in the evening: “In one lifetime, one can embody a great American story.”

Beginning today, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Silence, one of the Brooklyn Museum’s finest European works on paper, will be on view for the first time in nearly 40 years in the third-floor Beaux-Arts Court (the European paintings gallery).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (British, 1828-1882). Silence, 1870. Dry pigment (pastel or chalk) on two sheets of joined wove paper, 41 7/8 x 30 3/8 in. (106.4 x 77.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Luke Vincent Lockwood, 46.188
The Pre-Raphaelite painter-poet described Silence, a large scale drawing of a beautiful brunette deep in thought, in a letter to his model-and rumored mistress-Jane Morris: “Silence holds in one hand a branch of peach, the symbol used by the ancients; its fruit being held to resemble the human heart and its leaf the human tongue. With the other hand she draws together the veil enclosing the shrine in which she sits.”  In Victorian England, the abstract idea of silence was often linked to mysticism, Neoplatonic philosophy, and even death (Eternal Silence), themes that preoccupied Rossetti later in life, particularly after 1862 when his wife and principal model Elizabeth Siddal took her life with an overdose of laudanum.
In 1865 Rossetti commissioned a series of photographs of Jane Morris posing in the garden of his London home, Tudor House. Three years later, he began a series of formal drawings of her, often for future paintings. Silence, however, was executed in 1870 as a finished, independent work of art. In 1872 the drawing was sold behind Rossetti’s back while he was convalescing from a breakdown in Scotland. Four years later he bought back Silence and sold it for £210 (today $6,500). By 1946 it was with one Luke Vincent Lockwood, who presented it to the Brooklyn Museum, where it was last exhibited in 1971.
For the next six months, New Yorkers will have a rare opportunity to see a Rossetti masterpiece on paper, nestled in the Beaux-Arts Court’s north wall between paintings of equally reflective women-Mary Magdalene and Catherine of Siena-from Renaissance Europe and America. (In 1870 Rossetti was looking at Renaissance portraits of Venetian women for inspiration.)  Because of the sensitive nature of the drawing’s medium (dry, crumbly pastel or colored chalk) and support (two sheets of horizontally joined wove paper), Brooklyn’s Senior Paper Conservator Toni Owen has approved the presentation of Silence in the Court for no more than six months; it will be shown under significantly dimmer lights than those employed for paintings.

Bugs Bunny Stamps, courtesy of National Postal Museum
What’s Up, Doc? His buck teeth and long ears may be timeless, but Bugs Bunny has reached a ripe old age. It was 70 years ago yesterday that everybody’s favorite “wascally wabbit” first popped his head out of his rabbit hole and posed the notorious aforementioned question to arch nemesis Elmer Fudd. Arguably the most famous cartoon character of all time, Bugs Bunny ushered in the Loony Tunes era that enraptured adults and children alike. Complete with slippery banana peels, plummeting planes and extensive carrot chomping, the Smithsonian Libraries blog posted a 1943 video of Bugs, alongside other links of interest, in tribute to his life in television.
Introducing the Art-O-Matic: Following the ban on cigarette vending machines in the late 1990s, artist Clark Whittington co-opted the machine and re-purposed it as an art dispenser for cigarette-sized, original works of art. The “Art-O-Matic” took off, and now Whittington oversees 83 such machines, one of which just arrived at the Luce Foundation Center for American Art. According to Eye Level, at five dollars per work, you can get your own miniature art straight out of this 60-year-old vending machine. Works include everything from jewelry to sculptures to collages, all handmade by an international array of artists.
It is an exciting time… As a result of a recent effort to broaden accessibility and searchability of all the Smithsonian has to offer, Smithsonian has produced a prototype of the Smithsonian Commons, a centralized online forum for the “Smithsonian research, collections and communities.” Featured recently by We Love DC, the Commons will open the doors to a global audience interested in the Smithsonian who aren’t necessarily able to travel to the museums in Washington, D.C. Explore, vote and comment on the prototype in order to shape the final product!
For lucky iPhone and Android owners, the Collections Search Center (CSC) has recently enhanced their mobile web portal, so that you can find any object in the collections that strikes your fancy while on the go. Simply visit the CSC Web site on your phone, and you’ll get to see the new and improved version.
Holy Mangrove! This past Monday, the National Museum of Natural History’s Ocean Portal blog celebrated International Mangrove Action Day. If you missed out this year, you can still listen to  a podcast of Dr. Candy Feller of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), in Edgewater, Md., speaking with SERC ecologist Dr. Dennis Whigham about the importance of these twisted, tropical plants. If you did take a moment out of your day for the mangroves, they invite you to share your celebration with other readers.

Photo by Brandon Springer
The Smithsonian museums may be associated with the institutional formality of its Beaux-Arts style buildings, not to mention its faux-Norman castle, but there is another Smithsonian.  A Smithsonian that is en vogue and hip, even a little bit bawdy. A Smithsonian that revels in campy fun and wild excess.
The fun emanates from the stark, cylindrical museum of contemporary and modern art, known as the Hirshhorn. And it takes place in the evening hours after the museum closes to the public and reopens as a hot nightspot, selling tickets to a crowd of art lovers and club crawlers. The Hirshhorn, which has celebrated the abstract and embraced the modern since it opened in 1971, clashes magnificently with its Beaux-Arts neighbors.
“After Hours,” the three-times-a-year event at the Hirshhorn has become wildly popular. Since 2007, the museum has given venue to underground and avante-garde local artists, allowing itself to be turned into not only a night club, but a club where the art on the walls is the real deal.
Last Friday, performance artist Shea Van Dorn was the latest to take over the Hirshhorn with his cadre of bohemians: DJs Matt Bailer and Bil Todd (who both spin with Van Dorn elsewhere), the collaborative theater group CRACK, and a harem of drag queens (Van Dorn himself doubling as the ever-illustrious queen, “Summer Camp”).
Camp didn’t disappoint.
“Oh my God we’re in a giant donut!” Camp crowed as she hurled actual donuts at the enormous crowd that had gathered in the museum’s courtyard from a bright yellow rickshaw that was carting her around the Hirshhorn fountain, followed by her “Hirshhorn cheerleaders.” Camp, who emceed the latter half of the show, had told MetroWeekly’s Doug Rule that the event would be “gayer” than ever before. Indeed, the show included performances from CRACK and low-budget films—one video depicted Summer Camp being chased through the museum by Smithsonian guards.
Hipsters, party boys, party girls, interns, young professionals, art fanatics, students, unemployed post-grads, D.C.’s youth were out in force. The 2,000-plus crowd poured through the museum’s exhibitions (the galleries were open late until 10), they squinted particularly hard at Yves Klein’s blue monochromes, in the much-acclaimed exhibit, “With the Void, Full Powers.” The Washington Post’s art critic Blake Gopnik has now twice reviewed the Klein exhibition, singing its praises. The crowd chattered and pointed and discussed Klein’s fire paintings and “air architecture.”
And then they danced.  Oh, did they dance.
As revelers moved from the galleries down to the dance floor, the harried bartenders poured out specialty drinks, including a special “summer fling” involving ginger, rosemary and vodka. From La Roux’s “Bulletproof” and all the club hits of the moment, to an updated remix of “You’re The One That I Want” from the musical “Grease,” the music and the dancing and the drinks and the art trove drove the over-21-year-old crowd into a happy place.
But, then the clock struck midnight. The show was over and 2,000 young D.C. gadabouts were herded onto Independence Avenue.
For more photos of the event, check out our photo gallery.
There’s one more After Hours this year, date to be determined. Check-in regularly with the Hirshhorn for updates and get your tickets early, this show sells out fast.

Today we are releasing apps for both iPhone and Droid that, simply, wrap our mobile website.  If we have a mobile web site, you may be asking why we felt we needed to release apps that basically do the same thing.  The answer is both simple and complicated.
Let’s look at our overall strategy for a moment.  Given the museum’s community-minded mission, we aim to spend our time developing content in a sustainable and accessible manner.  This means closely adhering to web standards and writing code and designing interfaces that play nicely across all platforms.  So, the first iteration of our Mobile Web launch was simple—hit www.brooklynmuseum.org on a mobile device and get redirected to a version of the site that renders well on (many) small screens.  Rather than create an app, we followed our strategy and developed so we didn’t need one, but everything can change quickly when you put people in the mix…
In order to launch our mobile site, I hosted a mobile meetup at Target First Saturday.  The purpose of the meetup was to get visitors started using Gallery Tag! and gain some feedback on the new game, but I was stunned at what happened as I met with folks.  Nine times out of ten, the owners of the devices had confused looks when I said, “open your web browser and go to www.brooklynmuseum.org.” I was floored at how much confusion was created just simply getting people to open their mobile browser.  Once we’d get through that, the idea of bookmarking it to the home screen was even more foreign.  At almost every turn, visitors were expecting an app.  Seeing these exchanges, I started to think about accessibility again. Of course, there’s the nuts and bolts web accessibility approach that we’ve been very committed to, but there are also accessibility issues around natural usage behavior.  In this case, it was clear to me that people on app phones wanted apps, not necessarily mobile websites and by not giving them an app, we were actually making it more difficult for them to find our content.

And, here we are.  We hired Dave Wilkinson to build apps for iPhone and Droid.  If you don’t know Dave, we knew him from his work on the Indicommons app and, besides that, he’s Flickr famous.  The apps are designed to simply wrap our existing mobile web site, which makes the endeavor sustainable for us.  We can continue to add content to the mobile site, but the apps themselves can stay static and this means we can avoid future development costs.  While we are not expecting downloads by the gazillons, we are hoping that this makes our mobile content accessible via as many avenues as possible.

Film still from BLOCK B (2008). Pang Khee Teck / Tanjung Aru Pictures 2007
All good things must come to an end and this week, we must bid adieu to several exhibits closing in early August. Be sure to see them before they close and are gone forever!
Black Box: Chris Chong Chan Fui — Closing August 1, 2010
The Hirshhorn’s Black Box theater showcases exhibitions of contemporary artists who use film or video as their creative medium. Chris Chong Chan Fui’s short film Block B captures dramas that unfold night and day on the various floors of a huge apartment complex, that houses Indian expatriates working on temporary contracts. The artist contrasts the static cinematography with vivid unpredictable narrative. Block B suggests issues related to surveillance and voyeurism, but also evokes the dramatic elements that are part of the fabric of daily life.
A Rare Encounter: Hope Diamond and Wittelsbach-Graff Diamond — Closing August 1, 2010
In this exhibit at the Natural History Musem, the Wittelsbach-Graff Diamond and the Hope Diamond are displayed together for the first time. The Wittelsbach-Graff’s deep blue color, flawless clarity, and royal history make it one of the most celebrated gemstones known. Its story goes back over 340 years, and the diamond has not appeared in public for more than 50 years. Both diamonds come from India and share the same rare blue color. Could they have come from the same mine? Smithsonian scientists compare the properties of both gems and explore this intriguing possibility. While the exhibit closes August 1, the Hope Diamond will continue to be on view on the second floor of the museum.
HIDE: Skin as Material and Metaphor: Part 1 — Closing August 1, 2010

The featured artists selected for this exhibition at the American Indian Museum’s George Gustav Heye Center in New York draw upon this rich subject in multifaceted ways, using both the material and concept of skin as a metaphor for widespread issues surrounding race, representation, as well as personal, historical and environmental trauma and perseverance. Part I includes solo installations by Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Inupiaq/Athabascan) and works by Nadia Myre (Anishinaabe).
Brian Jungen: Strange Comfort – Closing August 8, 2010

Brian Jungen's artwork, People's Flag, on display at the National Museum of the American Indian as part of his solo exhibition Strange Comfort. Photo by NMAI staff photographer Katherine Fogden.
Brian Jungen is widely regarded as the foremost Native artist of his generation; his art transforms the familiar and banal into exquisite objects that reference themes of globalization, pop culture, museums, and the commodification of Indian imagery. He first came to prominence with Prototypes for New Understandings (1998-2005), which fashioned Nike footwear into masks that suggested Northwest Coast iconography. His work has also included a pod of whales made from plastic chairs, totem poles made from golf bags, and a massive basketball court made from 224 sewing tables. This exhibit at the American Indian Museum in D.C. features some of these iconic works as well as some pieces which have, until now, never been shown in the United States.
Ramp It Up: Skateboard Culture in Native America – Closing August 8, 2010
This exhibition at the Heye Center features rare and archival photographs and film of Native skaters, as well as skatedecks from Native companies and contemporary artists, to celebrate the vibrancy, creativity, and controversy of American Indian skate culture. Skateboarding is one of the most popular sports on Indian reservations and has inspired American Indian and Native Hawaiian communities to host skateboard competitions and build skate parks to encourage their youth. Native entrepreneurs own skateboard companies and sponsor community-based skate teams. Native artists and filmmakers, inspired by their skating experiences, credit the sport with teaching them a successful work ethic.
Graphic Masters III: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum — Closing August 8, 2010
On view are watercolors, pastels, and drawings from the 1960s to the 1990s, to celebrate the extraordinary variety and accomplishment of American artists’ works on paper. The works on view reveal the central importance of this medium for American artists, both as studies for creations in other media and as finished works of art. Artists represented include such masters as Robert Arneson, Jennifer Bartlett, Philip Guston, Luis Jimenez, and Wayne Thiebaud.

Two officers from the Brunei Museum, Awang Abdul Hady bin Hj Samsuddin (Museum Officer) and Awang Mohammad Qamarul Islam bin Mahmud (Ranger), are currently in Singapore for a week-long study trip from 26 to 30 Jul 2010. The first leg of their trip is RMBR, where they will learn about field collection techniques and equipment; techniques in specimen preservation; mounting methods; database management of museum specimens; deposition, care and management of type and non-type specimens; policies and loan arrangement of museum specimens; and outreach programmes. They will visit NParks and AVA next.

[Photograph by Tan Heok Hui]