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Author: Mary Jo Arnoldi
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
ISBN: 1935623737
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 506
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Book Description
How do we come to know the world around us? What about worlds apart from our own—outer space, distant cultures, or even long-past eras of history? Engaging Smithsonian Objects through Science, History, and the Arts explores these questions and suggests an answer: we come to know our world and worlds apart through the objects that represent them. Objects are a window, and by looking through them we can learn and understand more about the people who made them and the time and place they came from. In the pursuit of this understanding museums are invaluable; they are repositories not just of things but also of past, present, and future knowledge. Engaging Smithsonian Objects puts these ideas into practice, using objects to bring us to new knowledge and showing how museums support us in the endeavor. The book is organized around ten objects from the Smithsonian’s vast collections. Some of the objects are iconic—the Ruby Slippers from the The Wizard of Oz or three Stradivarius string instruments—while others are more ordinary, though no less interesting—an Iron Lung or a Hawaiian gourd drum. Two different authors with expertise in different academic disciplines write about each object from their unique professional and personal perspective. Both the authors and the ten featured objects represent a range of academic disciplines, from art to anthropology to geology. Taken together, the twenty essays in the book demonstrate just how much we can learn from objects by considering their kaleidoscopic meaning and significance from a variety of viewpoints. The book’s interdisciplinary engagement with objects was inspired by the Smithsonian Material Culture Forum, now in its twenty-sixth year. For students of material culture and museum studies, this book illustrates the vitality and value of exploring material culture through the lens of intersecting disciplinary perspectives. For students of curiosity and lifelong learning, this book offers a lively and thoughtful look into the Smithsonian’s collection and the many vibrant worlds it represents. Richly illustrated with color plates and photographs throughout, Engaging Smithsonian Objects through Science, History, and the Arts is a beautiful and stimulating answer to the question, “How do we know our world, and how can we know more?”
Author: Mary Jo Arnoldi
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
ISBN: 1935623737
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 506
Get Book Here
Book Description
How do we come to know the world around us? What about worlds apart from our own—outer space, distant cultures, or even long-past eras of history? Engaging Smithsonian Objects through Science, History, and the Arts explores these questions and suggests an answer: we come to know our world and worlds apart through the objects that represent them. Objects are a window, and by looking through them we can learn and understand more about the people who made them and the time and place they came from. In the pursuit of this understanding museums are invaluable; they are repositories not just of things but also of past, present, and future knowledge. Engaging Smithsonian Objects puts these ideas into practice, using objects to bring us to new knowledge and showing how museums support us in the endeavor. The book is organized around ten objects from the Smithsonian’s vast collections. Some of the objects are iconic—the Ruby Slippers from the The Wizard of Oz or three Stradivarius string instruments—while others are more ordinary, though no less interesting—an Iron Lung or a Hawaiian gourd drum. Two different authors with expertise in different academic disciplines write about each object from their unique professional and personal perspective. Both the authors and the ten featured objects represent a range of academic disciplines, from art to anthropology to geology. Taken together, the twenty essays in the book demonstrate just how much we can learn from objects by considering their kaleidoscopic meaning and significance from a variety of viewpoints. The book’s interdisciplinary engagement with objects was inspired by the Smithsonian Material Culture Forum, now in its twenty-sixth year. For students of material culture and museum studies, this book illustrates the vitality and value of exploring material culture through the lens of intersecting disciplinary perspectives. For students of curiosity and lifelong learning, this book offers a lively and thoughtful look into the Smithsonian’s collection and the many vibrant worlds it represents. Richly illustrated with color plates and photographs throughout, Engaging Smithsonian Objects through Science, History, and the Arts is a beautiful and stimulating answer to the question, “How do we know our world, and how can we know more?”
Author: Smithsonian Institution
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
ISBN: 158834665X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
An inspiring and surprising celebration of U.S. women's history told through Smithsonian artifacts illustrating women's participation in science, art, music, sports, fashion, business, religion, entertainment, military, politics, activism, and more. This book offers a unique, panoramic look at women's history in the United States through the lens of ordinary objects from, by, and for extraordinary women. Featuring more than 280 artifacts from 16 Smithsonian museums and archives, and more than 135 essays from 95 Smithsonian authors, this book tells women's history as only the Smithsonian can. Featured objects range from fine art to computer code, from First Ladies memorabilia to Black Lives Matter placards, and from Hopi pottery to a couch from the Oprah Winfrey show. There are familiar objects--such as the suffrage wagon used to advocate passage of the 19th Amendment and the Pussy Hat from the 2016 Women's March in DC--as well as lesser known pieces revealing untold stories. Portraits, photographs, paintings, political materials, signs, musical instruments, sports equipment, clothes, letters, ads, personal posessions, and other objects reveal the incredible stories of such amazing women as Phillis Wheatley, Julia Child, Sojourner Truth, Mary Cassatt, Madam C. J. Walker, Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mamie Till Mobley, Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta, Phyllis Diller, Celia Cruz, Sandra Day O'Connor, Billie Jean King, Sylvia Rivera, and so many more. Together with illuminating text, these objects elevate the importance of American women in the home, workplace, government, and beyond. Published to commemorate the centennial of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, Smithsonian American Women is a deeply satisfying read and a must-have reflection on how generations of women have defined what it means to be recognized in both the nation and the world.
Author: Beth Py-Lieberman
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
ISBN: 1588347508
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
From Dorothy's ruby slippers to a speech that saved Teddy Roosevelt from assassination, this authoritative guide delivers in-depth reportage on the history of remarkable objects from the Smithsonian's collections For American history, pop culture, and museum enthusiasts With charm and exuberance, The Object at Hand presents a behind-the-scenes vantage point of the Smithsonian collections. Veteran Smithsonian magazine editor Beth Py-Lieberman weaves together adaptations of the magazine's extensive and compelling coverage and interviews with scholars, curators, and historians to take readers on an unforgettable journey through the Smithsonian museums. Objects are grouped into the themes audacity, utopia, fierce, haunting, deception, lost, desire, triumph, scale, optimism, playful, rhythm, and revealing to engage with the emotional dimensions of each object, how they relate to each other, and how they fit into the larger American story. A sampling includes: The Star-Spangled Banner Frida Kahlo's love letter to Diego Rivera Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Vega 5B Nat Turner's Bible An AIDS quilt panel honoring Roger Gail Lyon A signpost from the Standing Rock protest A glass-plate portrait of Abraham Lincoln Life-sized model of a Megalodon The Hope Diamond Chuck Berry's Cadillac Portrait of Henrietta Lacks Py-Lieberman reflects on the profound connections between even outwardly dissimilar objects, and offers insight and stories from Smithsonian experts. The book explores artworks, scientific specimens, historical artifacts, airplanes, spacecraft, plants, and so much more, contemplating how each item represents different facets of humanity and resonates with cultural meaning in surprising ways. Whimsical, affecting, and insightful, The Object at Hand offers an intimate and exclusive tour of the Smithsonian collections.
Author: Smithsonian Institution
Publisher: Smithsonian Books (DC)
ISBN:
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
The seven sections of the book focus on places and people where the Smithsonian is particularly active: Up front with the exhibits, behind the scenes with the objects and the collections themselfes, in the laboratories and out at the zoo with natural history scientists, looking at the human condition with anthropologists & etc.
Author: Keely Orgeman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300215185
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 173
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Book Description
A long-overdue publication that restores Wilfred to the art-historical canon Lumia presents a long-overdue reevaluation of the groundbreaking artist Thomas Wilfred (1889-1968), whose unprecedented works prefigured light art in America. As early as 1919, many years before the advent of consumer television and video technology, Wilfred began experimenting with light as his primary artistic medium, developing the means to control and project unique compositions of colorful, undulating light forms, which he referred to collectively as lumia. Manifested as both live performances on a cinematic scale and self-contained structures, Wilfred's innovative displays captivated audiences and influenced generations of artists to come. This publication, the first dedicated to Wilfred in over forty years, draws on the artist's personal archives and includes a number of insightful essays that trace the development of his work and its relation to his cultural milieu. Featuring a foreword by the celebrated artist James Turrell, Lumia helps to secure Wilfred's rightful place within the canon of modern art.
Author: Kirsty Gillespie
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1760461121
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 519
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Book Description
This volume of essays honours the life and work of Stephen A. Wild, one of Australia’s leading ethnomusicologists. Born in Western Australia, Wild studied at Indiana University in the USA before returning to Australia to pursue a lifelong career with Indigenous Australian music. As researcher, teacher, and administrator, Wild’s work has impacted generations of scholars around the world, leading him to be described as ‘a great facilitator and a scholar who serves humanity through music’ by Andrée Grau, Professor of the Anthropology of Dance at University of Roehampton, London. Focusing on the music of Aboriginal Australia and the Pacific Islands, and the concerns of archiving and academia, the essays within are authored by peers, colleagues, and former students of Wild. Most of the authors are members of the Study Group on Music and Dance of Oceania of the International Council for Traditional Music, an organisation that has also played an important role in Wild’s life and development as a scholar of international standing. Ranging in scope from the musicological to the anthropological—from technical musical analyses to observations of the sociocultural context of music—these essays reflect not only on the varied and cross-disciplinary nature of Wild’s work, but on the many facets of ethnomusicology today.
Author: Alvaro Jarrín
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800730322
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
The technological capacity to transform biology - repairing, reshaping and replacing body parts, chemicals and functions – is now part of our lives. Humanity is confronted with a variety of affordable and non-invasive 'enhancement technologies': anti-ageing medicine, aesthetic surgery, cognitive and sexual enhancers, lifestyle drugs, prosthetics and hormone supplements. This collection focuses on why people find these practices so seductive and provides ethnographic insights into people’s motives and aspirations as they embrace or reject enhancement technologies, which are closely entangled with negotiations over gender, class, age, nationality and ethnicity.
Author: Kylie Message
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315294079
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 139
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Book Description
Collecting Activism, Archiving Occupy Wall Street explores the material collections produced by participants of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 that bear witness to the experience and agency of ‘the 99%’. Examining processes of collection development as a lens through which to investigate the sociology of protest and reform movements, the book questions what contribution a dual study of the material culture of dissent and the production of a collection hosting the material culture of dissent might offer to a range of disciplines and practices. It asks if and how a collections-based study can test the propositions, tactics, and limits of activism from archival, museological, and political perspectives. Collecting Activism, Archiving Occupy Wall Street draws from interdisciplinary fields, including museum studies, collection studies, archive studies, cultural studies, and public history. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and practitioners engaged with contemporary cause-based collecting, activist archiving, public history, and the cultural politics and sociology of social reform movements. It models strategies for ‘activating’ historical archives and collections-based data, and for engaging with autoethnographic records to represent and analyze the material residue of protest and reform movements today.
Author: G. Wayne Clough
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820355232
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Things New and Strange chronicles a research quest undertaken by G. Wayne Clough, the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution born in the South. Soon after retiring from the Smithsonian, Clough decided to see what the Smithsonian collections could tell him about South Georgia, where he had spent most of his childhood in the 1940s and 1950s. The investigations that followed, which began as something of a quixotic scavenger hunt, expanded as Clough discovered that the collections had many more objects and documents from South Georgia than he had imagined. These objects illustrate important aspects of southern culture and history and also inspire reflections about how South Georgia has changed over time. Clough’s discoveries—animal, plant, fossil, and rock specimens, along with cultural artifacts and works of art—not only serve as a springboard for reflections about the region and its history, they also bring Clough’s own memories of his boyhood in Douglas, Georgia, back to life. Clough interweaves memories of his own experiences, such as hair-raising escapes from poisonous snakes and selling boiled peanuts for a nickel a bag at the annual auction of the tobacco crop, with anecdotes from family lore, which launches an exploration of his forebears and their place in South Georgia history. In following his engaging and personal narrative, we learn how nonspecialists can use museum archives and how family, community, and natural history are intertwined.
Author: G. Wayne Clough
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
ISBN: 0981950019
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 78
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Book Description
Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, asks “How can we prepare ourselves to reach the generation of digital natives who bring a huge appetite—and aptitude—for the digital world?” He explains how the Smithsonian is tackling this issue in Best of Both Worlds: Museums, Libraries, and Archives in a Digital Age. Libraries and archives have already made many documents available through the Internet. The digital world presents a bigger challenge for museums; producing images of 3D objects is more complicated, and collections are built with exhibitions in mind rather than open access on computers. In 2009, the Smithsonian began digitizing its vast collections to make them accessible to the millions of people who do not visit the museums in person. “Digital access can provide limitless opportunities for engagement and lifelong learning.” Clough sees museums gradually moving beyond showcasing collections to engaging the public online so “visitors” can access the objects they find most interesting. Education has always been at the core of the Smithsonian. Today, the Smithsonian offers materials and lesson plans that meet state standards for K–12 curricula; online summits on many diverse subjects; the Collections Search Center website; and apps. The Smithsonian’s website, www.seriouslyamazing.com, draws people in with fun questions and then takes them deeper into the subject. The question “What European colonizer is still invading the U.S. today?” reveals not only the answer—earthworms—but also in-depth info on worms from environmental researchers. Clough concludes with this thought: “While digital technology poses great challenges, it also offers great possibilities.”
