Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service

Bittersweet Harvest: Bracero posters tell common stories

Feedback is great. We do what we do because we believe that somehow our work makes a difference to people, and when folks take the time to tell us that we're doing a good job, we can't help but take it in and flash a small but satisfied smile, knowing that someone out there has been enriched by our work.

Here's a letter one of our project directors recently received in reference to our FREE poster exhibit "Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Project, 1942-1964."

 

Dear Amanda,
 
I can't begin to tell you the effect the Bracero Posters have had on me.  They are absolutely beautiful, powerful and, obviously, thought provoking.
 
Every Tuesday, I take a group of folks to Nogales, Sonora to El Comedor, a program set up by the Sisters of the Eucharist and Jesuits . . . In looking at the posters, many migrant faces come into view - faces of those struggling so hard just to feed their families.
 
November 30 and December 1 mark the 30th anniversary of the Sanctuary Movement, 25th anniversary of Borderlinks (a Tucson- based organization) and the 10th anniversary of Tucson Samaritans. We are having a conference which is titled "La Lucha Sigue - the Struggle Continues."
 
Not only will the posters be used for this conference, but January 19th is the 9th annual Border Issues Fair, and, for sure, the posters will be present there, as well.
 
I am grateful to you for producing and forwarding these "gems" to me in such a timely manner.
 
Please know that you are always welcome to come and see first hand what we do.
 
Sincerely,
Shura W.

Getting a "Mail Call" on Veteran's Day

This weekend, SITES newest exhibition Mail Call opens at the Spartanburg County Public Library in South Carolina. Mail Call explores the vital connections between military service members and their family and friends--as told in letters penned over the centuries, from  the American Revolution through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At its heart, the exhibition is a homage to the power of words and to human communications at times of distress as well as triumph. 

Some of the most compelling letters in the exhibition were written by members of the Walters family during the Civil War. Private David Walters (Company I, 5, Indiana Cavalry) communicates with his beloved wife Rachel and his relatives as he travels through middle America.

The post marks on David's missives indicate that he mailed correspondence from small towns like Pomeroy, Indiana; Argus, Indiana; Old Point Comfort, Virginia; and Glasgow, Kentucky.

Despite living what must have been a difficult and unsettled life, David remained cheerful on Christmas Day, 1862, as he recounted the happenings of the day to his dear wife:

Camp Near Risingsun
Dec. 25th 1862

Dear Wife,
   
This is Christmas & drole one it is to what I am used to   it is warm & raining   the boys are enjoying them selves very well laying round in their respective tents some riting some telling fish storieys & some doing one thing & some another

the health of the company is good only three being sick   Collonel Williams of riseing sun has volunteered to come to our camp onse a day to attend to the sick   we are well treated by the [lined out]citizens   they bring in something every day for the sick   this morning we had a large trey of sausage sent to us for a Christmas gift
   
they have promised us a new years dinner   we face here a goodeal better than we did at Camp Carington   our vituals is better & more of them  we ar camped two miles west of rising sun 14 miles from Laurenceberg & 96 miles below Cincinattia   I stood the trip well   the first night I stayed in camp carington ton  then we came to Laurenceberg & from there I walked a good part of the way to our camp
   
this is a ritch county &vairy healthy but it is broken & hilly   there seems to be but little yet wh a bout the people here   the most of them is well off & live in old log houses   some have brick bildings but loosely finished
   
We ar in Ohio county   Riseing sun is the county town Rising sun is a very noise(?) place there is about 23 hundred inhabitance and well supplied with churches one Baptist one Christian two Presbyterian one Methodist & one universalist   there is a good seminary here with about two hundred scholars   the boats still run regular & will continue to do so as long as the river is open   there is no regular soaldiers here except our company   there is about 15 hundred home guard & legions in this county   they are fully organised & reddy to turn out at any call   we expect to have some thing to do before long as the secesh is geting quite saucey   they ar begining to act about as they did last summer before Morgan come in   they say that they ar looking for a heavy secesh forse thrown in before long
   
pleas rite as often as you can   take good care of your self & child   direct your letters to Riseing Sun Camp near Riseingsun Company 15th Cavailry Ind. Vol.  so I will close & remain yours as ever
   
David Walters

The Walters' series includes more than 80 letters, now housed in the collection at the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum

We'll be featuring one letter a week in a new series called "Mail Call Mondays" on our Facebook page @http://www.facebook.com/sitesExhibitions.

 

Hot Off the Presses: Bracero Posters are Born!

The folks here are SITES are, well, diversified. We've got experts on just about everything from putting together 100+ object traveling exhibitions to writing press releases to developing and designing poster sets for mass distribution.

SITES' Director of Strategic Communications, Andrea Stevens, is our woman on the ground in the last catogory. She's been at the forefront of producing a cache of free, educational poster sets that are, in turn, distributed to thousands and thousands of teachers, librarians, and community leaders across the country. Her latest project tells the little-known but fascinating story of the Bracero Program--the largest guest worker collective in U.S. history. Between 1942 and 1964, millions of Mexican men came to the U.S. on short-term labor contracts.

It's an important story, so the posters--in both design and printing--had to be just right. Andrea spent a day in Baltimore recently at the HBP Whitmore Press, making sure that those 5,000 poster sets (totalling some 30,000 prints) were top notch.

If you thought that just pushing "print" was the final stroke, check out her notes from the field:

"The printing press we're using is a new Heidelberg XL 105. It can print six colors plus aqueous coating and can easily run 5,000 sheets in about 30 minutes. The Bittersweet Harvest posters were designed to fit two to a sheet for economical reasons, so the print job entailed three sets of press sheets.

Each poster is checked for color balance. Tim, the press man, constantly uses a "densitometer" to measure ink. [Try that one in your next "Words with Friends" game!]

We're shipping the posters to schools across the country now. Utimately, the posters are a portable teaching resource that offers historical context, asks big questions, challenges perceptions, tells powerful stories, and provides a platform which encourages dialogue and civic engagement."

For more information about our traveling exhibition related to this topic, visit SITES' Bracero exhibition page, or see the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History's Bracero Archives.

Check out the complete poster set too! The project received support from the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center.

William H. Johnson and the Smithsonian: An Indelible Connection

Our traveling exhibition William H. Johnson: An American Modern is currently on display at Morgan State University’s James E. Lewis Museum, in Baltimore, Maryland, through June 31st. While you might be familiar with the artist William H. Johnson, you may not know the story behind how Johnson’s artwork came into the Smithsonian's collection. The Institution was among three pivotal and inextricably linked players in the history of Johnson’s artwork, the others being Dr. James E. Lewis and the Harmon Foundation.

A bit of background: William H. Johnson was born in Florence, South Carolina, in 1901, and is considered an important figure in modern American art. He studied at the National Academy of Design in New York, producing thousands of works that covered several different artistic genres--mainly post impressionism, fauvism, and expressionism.

During the 1920s and '30s, he moved between both America and Europe (France, Denmark, and Norway as well as North Africa), before eventually settling in New York City in 1938. Johnson stopped painting in the late 1940s, after a slow mental decline left him in institutionalized care.

With no living family and no storage space to house his paintings, Johnson's work was nearly destroyed. In 1956, however, the Harmon Foundation, a non-profit organization that helped foster awareness of African American art, stepped in and rescued the works. The foundation took ownership of Johnson's books and paintings--some 1,154 of them to be exact. When the foundation itself finally had to shut its doors in 1967, the Johnson works went to the Smithsonian’s National Collections of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum).

The terms of the agreement stipulated that the Smithsonian donate some artwork to black colleges and universities, including Baltimore’s Morgan State University. The founding chair of Morgan’s art department, Dr. James E. Lewis, was the first to carefully select works for his museum’s permanent collection. Lewis chose 20 works that embodied the critical stages of Johnson’s career, including his post-impressionist and expressionist works of the 1920s and his vernacular paintings from the end of his career in the 1940s. Johnson’s style was somewhat similar to Van Gogh and Cezanne's, and yet there was an acknowledgement that Johnson's works were distinctive, unforgettable visions from an modern American  artist.

Now SITES is the first organization to travel all 20 of Johnson’s seminal works from Morgan State‘s collection. The Smithsonian has truly come full circle with William H. Johnson. Not only has it been able to carry out the Harmon Foundation’s wishes by dispensing Johnson’s work to Morgan State University, but we've also had the privilege of being able to share these works with people across the country.

William H. Johnson: An American Modern was developed by Morgan State University and SITES, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Morgan State University Foundation, Inc. Additional support for this exhibition was provided by Ford Motor Company Fund.

>> Chronology of Johnson's life, coutesy Smithsonian American Art Museum

--Christin Chism, SITES public relations associate

 

 

 

 

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Memorial Day Tribute

In the fall of this year, SITES launches a new exhibition that tells the story of Americans at war--gathered not from the accounts of generals or historians but from soldiers who fought on the front lines during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and all the other major conflicts, leading us right up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Mail Call is slated to open at the Spartanburg County Public Library in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and reveals the quiet, sometimes agonized words of soldiers as they articulated matters of  love, life, and death. 

Often soldiers penned letters to fill the time and emptiness of being in camp or on the move: "June 5, 1898: Dear Mother and Sisters, Will write again today although I don't know what to say . . . ." And sometimes, they just wanted to report that they were alive and seemingly well: "April 30, 1918: Dear Dad and Aunt Clara, I am well and o.k. Just finished two days and two nights thru France . . ." Still others simply wanted to maintain their tenuous connections to life at home. "Alice sent me her picture last night, and it's just like her. She has on a Salvation Army bonnet."

Regardless of what the letters contained, they were not immediate. Many missives reveal the difficulty of waiting to receive news about family members back home: "Not yet having heard from you, I thought I would write again . . .," wrote one World War I solider. Imagine not knowing if a sister had survived scarlet fever, or if a baby had been born, or myriad other things that time and distance kept silent. Letters were a soldier's only connection to the world and family he left behind.

And the same was true for the families at home, but many times, letters were the harbingers of the worst news of all. Here's an excerpt of a letter from Sergeant John S. Louderbach to the wife of a Union solider, dated May 27, 1865:

I think I am Safe in Saying that your Husband D W Walters Died in Reble Prision about the 10th of Febuary I Saw him a bout the 5th he was then unable to help him self I waited on him & gave him as much Comfort as I could untill I was taken down my Self He often Spoke of you & his little Boy Whitch he Spoke of with a greateal of Respect & Seemed to waiting with a greateal of anxziety for the thime to Come when the Prision doores would be thrown open that he could return to his loved ones at home but alas the Small amount of Meal that he was allowed was not Suffitient for him I did not se him Dye my self but I have bin told by Competen Persons that he Died a bout the thime that I have Stated . . .

 Mail Call is a collaboration with the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum.



Message from Smithsonian Chief about New African American Museum

Tomorrow will be a historic day for the Smithsonian—it is the day we break ground for our 19th museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The museum was created by an Act of Congress in 2003, and it is the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, art, history and culture.

We will celebrate this milestone at a special groundbreaking ceremony that will take place on the site of the museum. We are honored that President Obama, Mrs. Obama, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), Gov. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), former First Lady Laura Bush and many other special guests will be with us for this occasion.

Congratulations to the museum’s director, Lonnie Bunch, and his entire staff on this occasion. They have been hard at work for the past nine years building the museum and ensuring it will be a place that will help all Americans learn about the richness of African American culture and its importance to the story of America.

Sincerely,
Wayne Clough
Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution

As a special note, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) is already working with the National Museum of African American History and Culture to bring its collections to the American people. Currently, SITES is traveling Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment as well as Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits.

American Work History Told in New Exhibit

Opening this September, The Way We Worked explores the causes and effects of the many changes to the American workforce and work environments over the past 150 years. 

Transforming a show comprised of 80 black-and-white archival photographs into a colorful, free-standing exhibition complete with objects, audio, and video is no easy task. But SITES' Museum on Main Street (MoMS) team has done it again! The Way We Worked began as an exhibition at the National Archives and then traveled with SITES in its original format for four years. Now the MoMS crew, together with the show's original curator and the folks at the Smithsonian Office of Exhibits Central (OEC), has created a spectacular new version of the show that hits the road this fall. The exhibition will travel to 180 communities in 30 states over its six years on the road.

The MoMS version of the show offers a fresh take on the exhibition content and a bold new experience for viewers. MoMS project director Robbie Davis said "moving away from framed photographs hanging on walls gave us a great deal of freedom to present the story in a new way." I recently visited OEC where the MoMS displays are created and assembled, and the photographs do indeed reveal new secrets when blown-up to life size, cropped to highlight small details, and presented as silhouetted forms. In addition, reproducing the photographs digitally allows for creative overlapping of images, juxtapositions, and comparisons with posters, murals, and advertisements. The new version of The Way We Worked has over twice as many photographs as the original--including color images of contemporary jobs--but the dynamic new display keeps the viewer's attention focused and engaged.


Bruce Bustard, the curator from the National Archives, was with me on my visit to OEC. As one
accustomed to working primarily with documents and photographs, he was especially impressed by the clever use of objects, noting that they "add texture to the exhibit while still keeping its original spirit." There are some objects which are familiar to viewers (a Blackberry smartPhone, for example), and others with which many will be unfamiliar. (Two I had never seen before were a secretary's shorthand practice book and computer punch cards.)

A special technology grant from the Smithsonian has allowed the MoMS team to transform the exhibition even more than they originally dreamed possible. Come September, the exhibition will have specially mounted video screens displaying archival video footage and fresh interviews documenting the role of work in Americans' lives. In addition, a cell phone-based audio guide, with information adapted to each state will be available to visitors, who will also be able to use their cell phones to add their own stories to an online oral history archive. 

For more information about MoMS, please visit the website. 

--Robin Meyer, SITES publications intern

 

Letters to the Home Front

"My dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and as my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name . . . If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you . . . "

This excerpt is from a letter written on the eve of the First Battle of Bull Run--150 years ago last Wednesday--by Union soldier Sullivan Ballou to his wife, Sarah. While Sullivan could not know his fate with certainty while writing this letter, he was mortally wounded in the battle and died without putting his final letter in the mail.  The letter, recently published in an article in The Washington Post, was delivered to Sarah along with her husband's personal effects after his death. 

SITES is planning a new exhibition that examines just this sort of epistilary drama. Mail Call, an exhibition created in partnership with the National Postal Museum, investigates all aspects of communication between the home front and the front lines, from the Revolutionary War to the present.  

Civil War artifacts, including hand-written letters like the Sullivan Ballou letter, stamps, envelopes and Confederate “adversity covers” (envelopes fashioned from old letters and scraps of paper) are included in Mail Call. In addition, the exhibition explores several important changes in the postal system which got their start during the Civil War.  

For example, money orders--a secure way to send relatively small amounts of money via the postal system--emerged during the war as a way for soldiers to send money home, and they continue to be used by both military personnel and civilians today. In addition, sorting mail on a moving train car (a difficult feat) began as an experiment during the Civil War. The change increased the efficiency of mail delivery to soldiers in Missouri so much so that after the war, it became standard procedure on all mail trains in the U.S.  

But, not all Civil War-era changes in the postal system were inspired by a need for efficiency or security. One aspect of the postal system which I’ve always taken for granted—home delivery—began during the Civil War as an act of kindness toward women. Each day, women flocked to the Cleveland post office in anticipation of letters from their loved ones in battle, but the contents of the letters they received were often highly personal and difficult to bear. Sensing that these women might prefer to receive such news in the privacy of their own homes rather than in front of the assembled masses, a creative postman organized a system for delivering letters to individuals at home.  

The excitement around the Civil War anniversary this year has caused us to take special note of the exhibition’s Civil War content, but this is just one piece of the Mail Call story. The exhibition goes on to explore related technical innovation and social change in the 20th and 21st centuries while paying special attention to those aspects of the story that are the same in all times. The distance and danger involved in military pursuits continue to inspire heartfelt correspondence like the “Sullivan Ballou letter," and letters and packages—and the dedication, courage, compassion, and ingenuity of everyone involved in transporting them—continue to be a vital source of communication and strength for our military personnel and their families around the globe. 

The National Postal Museum will open a permanent Mail Call exhibition in November 2011. Check out the exhibition website. For information about hosting SITES's traveling version of Mail Call, please contact Ed Liskey at liskeye@si.edu.

--Robin Meyer, SITES publications intern

Sweet and Sour: Chinese Food from Chinatown to Main Street

Sweet and Sour is an emerging collaboration between SITES and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History on Chinese food in America.

Something about Chinese food always draws a crowd, and this morning's Sweet and Sour team meeting was no exception. We found ourselves cramming 11 people around a table meant for six to brainstorm and discuss the content of this epicurean exhibition. All that was missing was the lazy Susan!

Our meeting began with a somewhat counter-intuitive declaration: Chinese food is American food. But really, who doesn't have memories of family dinners at a local Chinese restaurant? From Jewish-American traditions of Chinese food on Christmas to television shows like Yan Can Cook to the 41,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S. (more than all burger joints combined!), Chinese food has become not just an integral part of American food culture but a quintessentially American food.

When Chinese restaurants (which emerged in the mid-19th century as small kitchens offering Chinese immigrants a taste of home) began catering to the American palate, recipes changed.  According to Cedric Yeh, the curatorial advisor for this project (and Deputy Chair and Associate Curator in the Division of Armed Forces History in the National Museum of American History), "They were selling the exotic. They were selling China. We haven't eaten Chinese food in over 100 years." Since we've been introduced to the cuisine, our familiarity with "Chinese food" has reached the point that all connotations of "the exotic" have been erased and the ubiquitous Chinese takeout box has come to symbolize a typical American meal in movies and TV.

Sweet and Sour will document this transition and, in doing so, provide a glimpse into the long history of Chinese immigration, exclusion, exoticism, and perseverance in the U.S. The exhibition will highlight the fact that Chinese food today is a uniquely American tradition.

As the discussion turned to ideas for objects and props that would communicate either the "all-American" nature of Chinese food or its historical roots, Cedric laid out a challenge: "There has to be a strong intellectual grounding to the exhibition, but also some flash." After listening to his ideas, Project Director Deborah Macanic smiled and asked, "Cedric, do you believe in kismet?"  As it turns out, SITES already has strong connections from previous exhibitions which may help turn Cedric's biggest "wish-list items" into reality.

In addition to these items, the exhibition will include artifacts form the National Museum of American History's new Sweet and Sour collecting initiative. Research specialist Noriko Sanefuji reported back on her recent trip to San Francisco's Chinatown where she went to gather background information for the project. While in SF, she met with Cecilia Chiang, P.F. Chang's mother and a pioneering restaurateur in her own right, along with several other restaurant owners and local historians. Interns are already hard at work scanning the photographs and menus that were given to Noriko on her trip. Keep a lookout for the images in the upcoming issue of Siteline!

It was smiles (and a few stomach rumbles) all around as we ended our meeting. Things are really cooking! Now, where are those fortune cookies?

--Robin Meyer, SITES Publications Intern

Veteran's Day Tribute: Native American Codetalkers

I sat at my desk this morning trying to come up with a story idea for a Veteran's Day article. I had a couple of thoughts and found myself digging through the exhibition script for one of our most important history shows: Native Words, Native Warriors, about the remarkable story of Native American soldiers (from more than a dozen tribes) who used their own languages to thwart American enemies in World Wars I and II. The codetalkers' messages were absolutely indeciperable to the Germans and their allies.

The irony is that most of these Native warriors learned English in government-sponsored Indian schools, designed to rid them of the very languages that eventually saved so many American lives. According to Forrest Kassanavoid (Comanche), U.S. Army, "They didn’t let us speak Comanche then. We had to be very careful, almost went underground to speak . . . They’d take that soap and make you wash your mouth out and tell you not to do it anymore . . . "

Then came difficult times. When the military issued a call to arms for Native Americans, many were more than willing to fulfil what they considered their duty. "One of the commitments I made," says  David E. Patterson (Navajo), U.S. Marine Corps, "was that I was willing to die for my country—the U.S., the Navajo Nation, and my family. My [Native] language was my weapon."

But how could Native languages provide words for the machinery of modern warfare? American Indians devised ways to cross the technological divide. The Navajo word "atsá," meaning eagle, became the code word for transport plane. The Hopi word "paaki," or houses on water, meant "ships." And, the Choctaw words "tuli tanampo chito shali," translated to big metal gun, was the secret phrase for "tank."

For a more in-depth look at the exhibition, lesson plans, and more, check out the companion website.