Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service

What's Happening this Month at SITES!

February is officially Black History Month, but SITES has a strong commitment to presenting exhibitions that celebrate and explore the African American experience which you can host any time of the year. Share with your audience Romare Bearden’s vibrant collages that reimagine Homer’s "The Odyssey" or the expressive figural paintings and landscapes of seminal artist William H. Johnson.

And in Black Wings: American Dreams of Flight, the story of African American pioneers in aviation like Bessie Coleman and the Tuskegee Airmen is brought to the forefront as an important chapter in American history. IndiVisible traces the histories and experiences of people with both African American and Native American heritage in the U.S.  And Jacob Lawrence Illustrates Aesop’s Fables will feature 23 powerful visual representations of these beloved tales by this important American artist. Interested? Contact us today for more information on how to host.

American Heroes Tour Begins at the National World War II Museum
American Heroes: Japanese American World War II Nisei Soldiers and the Congressional Gold Medal kicked-off its tour at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans on January 12, 2013. Eighteen Nisei veterans from 10 states participated in an opening ceremony that featured remarks by Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Megan Madeira, Hawaii’s National History Day winner, Irene Hirano-Inouye, wife of the late Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI), Dr. Nick Mueller, Museum President and CEO, Anna Cohn, SITES Director, and Christine Sato-Yamazaki, National Veterans Network Chairperson. The ceremony was followed by a luncheon with a keynote presentation by Eric K. Shinseki, Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

The luncheon closed with a panel discussion featuring children of Nisei soldiers, who discussed growing up with these often modest but truly remarkable veterans. Weekend celebrations included a tour of the Museum’s new U.S. Freedom Pavilion and a viewing of the “Beyond All Boundaries” 4-D movie about WWII. At a special lunch, the Museum’s Victory Belles entertained the “troops” and serenaded George Fujimoto, a veteran of the 442nd, who was celebrating his 93rd birthday. The American Heroes next stop will be at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu beginning March 9, 2013.

Letters from Loved Ones
Mail Call opens on February 9th, just in time for Valentine’s Day at the Sonoma County Museum, a Smithsonian Affiliate in Santa Rosa, CA. As a tribute to the emotions often conveyed between loved ones through military mail, the opening will feature live patriotic music, letter writing and children’s drawings to be sent to current overseas veterans. The upcoming Family Day will include letter crafts, stamp activities, and V-Mail stationary coloring for kids and free admission for veterans all weekend. The "Storytelling Evening" in March will feature intimate readings of soldiers’ letters to loved-ones from the Civil War, World War II and Vietnam War-eras by a circle of regional storytellers. Letters include those from Edward D. Washington, a Civil War African-American soldier, and Jane Wandry, a combat surgical nurse who served in World War II and earned seven battle stars.

In Remembrance of Jeff Thompson

Recently, we said farewell to a trusted and respected member of our staff. Jeffrey E. Thompson, a project director at SITES for some 20 years, will be missed by many, including those who shared these thoughtful rembrances of our friend Jeff:

"What I will remember most about Jeff were his precise, artful and almost loving movements in preparing his loose-leaf green tea, filling his stylish, white ceramic teapot, soaking the tea and then cleaning his utensils, several times a day in our small kitchen at SITES. It was like being an accidental witness to a calming and deliberate tea ceremony in which his movements reflected his personality." --Ed

"I valued him greatly as I know many others did both in and outside of SITES." --Pawan

"Jeff was such an even person, always calm, cool, and collected. He lent dignity, professionalism, and wit to every conversation and every project he touched." --Heather

"...I may share in the sadness of farewell to a noble, intelligent, and witty colleague. I am struggling with the fact that Jeff is gone. As you so rightly observe, his absence will mark many." --Elizabeth

"After attending what I thought to be a wonderful home going service for Jeff, I realized Monday morning would come, and he and I would no longer meet in the kitchen to discuss why we seemed to be the only two who fill the ice trays, ice bucket or paper towels. Nor would I hear about why it was better to drink loose tea rather than tea out of a bag, and I realized I never got a chance to thank Jeff for sharing his wit, sense of humor (as dry as it may have been) and knowledge on every subject." --Stephanie

Jeff received a Master's degree in Art History from Williams College and a B.A. from the College of William and Mary. His many academic honors included the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Fellowship, Yale University Fellowship, and NYU's prestigious Frick Symposium Lecture. He taught Art History at Princeton, Duke, Yale, and the University of Minnesota. Here are some of the exhibitions Jeff worked on in his 20 years at the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service:

381 Days: The Montgomery Bus Boycott Story (AARP version)
A Different Light:  L’Ėcole Lyonnaise 19th-Century French Painting from the Musėe des Beaux Arts, Lyon
A Popular Renaissance:  Hand-Colored Woodcuts in the Age of Dürer
After the Revolution
Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing:  The Apollo Theater
Americanos: Latino Life in the United States
Art of our Time: The Olga Hirshhorn Collection
Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South
Diana Walker: Photojournalist
Dreams and Traditions: 300 Years of British and Irish Painting from the Ulster Museum, Belfast
Exhibit Saigon, Enter Little Saigon: Vietnamese America Since 1975
From Istanbul to Cairo: Views of the Middle East from the Victoria and Albert Museum
Mexico: A Landscape Revisited
Moscow: Treasures and Traditions
On Miniature Wings: Model Aircraft of the National Air and Space Museum
Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photographs from the National Archives
Renaissance Bronzes
Robert Rauschenberg, Artist-Citizen: Posters for a Better World
Singgalot (The Ties That Bind): Filipinos in America, from Colonial Subjects to Citizens
Southern Africa, 1936-1949: Photographs by Constance Stuart Larrabee
The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden
The Artistry of African Currency
The Jazz Age in Paris (ALA version)
The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family
The Way We Worked: Photographs from the National Archives
Through My Father’s Eyes
Visionary Anatomies
Voyages and Visions

One Man's Trash . . . Bottle Cap Mural Inspired by "Green Revolution"

You know the saying, "One man's trash is another man's treasure." We're happy to report that the trash-to-treasure phenomenon can now be applied to Smithsonian traveling exhibitions!

The Centro de Ciencias y Artes A.C, Planetario Alfa in San Pedro Garza Garcia, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, is preparing a Spanish presentation of SITES’ digital exhibition, Green Revolution, to open on March 15, 2013.  Planetario staff members, school groups and general visitors recently created an 8 x 79 foot mural on the exterior of their building, made entirely of 60,000 bottle caps. One complimentary entrance pass was given for every 50 bottle caps donated (or one pass for every 10 hard-to-find black ones).   

The United Nations designated 2013 as the International Year of Water Cooperation, and the mural design reflects that theme. The boat in the mural symbolizes the union of countries working together for the care of water, the whale symbolizes species in danger of extinction, the octopus symbolizes children and their fantasies and the sun symbolizes hope.  The mural will be on display for at least one year and the Planetario plans to create another mural in the Waste Not! section of Green Revolution.  Other Mexican institutions are now copying this project using their own designs.  Images courtesy Angelica Flores.

 

 

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.

Remembering Sally Ride: A SITES Staffer's Perspective

A few months ago, my mom sent me an old homework assignment that she had found--a paper that I wrote and illustrated in the second grade. The topic: my hero, Sally Ride. It was 1983, and Ride was about to become the first American woman in space. For a little girl, it was exciting. And Ride's amazing first space flight sparked my imagination, inspiring a life-long interest in the space program. From that day on, I wanted to be an astronaut. I loved science and tuned in for as many shuttle launches as I could. I even went to Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama.

I was, and still am, a space geek. I didn’t become an astronaut, but I continue to learn and explore at the Smithsonian, working on exhibitions about everything--from Latin music to the Muppets, from giant squid to the science of the spacesuit.

It’s those space-related projects that have really let my inner geek shine, and I could go on forever about meeting real astronauts and visiting NASA facilities for our traveling exhibits. Regardless of the topic, however, I’ve continued to be curious, and I hope the stories that we create here at SITES help to spark the imaginations of others--just like Sally Ride did for me. So, it’s with sadness that I say good bye to my hero. Thank you for inspiring me, Sally.

Ride, Sally. Ride.

--Jennifer Schommer, SITES Assistant Director of Public Relations

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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Garage Sales + Museum People=Love

So, I determined that garage sales and flea markets are to many museum people what water and bread are to everybody else. We love old stuff. And, what passionate art collector, what red-blooded American historian hasn't tuned in to PBS' "Antiques Road Show" at one time or another, only to be flabbergasted by someone who paid .25 for an item at a rummage sale and discovered that it was a piece of Newcomb pottery or a Chinese jade from the 16th century? 

That didn't  exactly happen to me (I wish), but I did manage to pick up a gem of a book at a yard sale last weekend. No, not a first edition Hemingway or a title signed by Mark Twain but a gorgeous red leather volume of the "Smithsonian Scientific Series," edited by Webster Prentiss True and published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1929. As a bibliophile and admitted dumpster diver, this was an amazing find. The book had been cleared from the homeowner's mother's attic some years ago and was flawlessly preserved, except for the delicious old-paper musk that wafted into the air when I flexed the pages.

I think it's fair to say, however, that this 83-year-old book hadn't been opened too many times before that day--a majority of pages were still attached, unseparated at the corners. Too bad, really, it's a treasure-trove of Smithsonian and American history and especially fascinating to someone who has spent nearly a decade coming in and out of the Smithsonian's "Castle," (1855) and the National Museum of Natural History (1910). Most of the photographs in the book were taken at these sites, among the memborable ones: the Institution's taxidermists' workroom, a 23-foot-high column of Smithsonian publications in the Castle, and an adorable baby hippo (obviously NOT taken inside one of these buildings).

 

What does the book have to do with SITES? I'm getting there. Hang tight.

Our traveling exhibition Lasting Light: 125 of Grand Canyon Photography has been on the road for a few years and features 60+ amazing images by contemporary canyon photographers. It also gives visitors a look back at those who paved the way for them--Emery and Ellsworth Kolb, Timothy O’Sullivan, and Jack Hillers, a boatman turned photographer on John Wesley Powell's 1872 expedition down the Colorado.

I spent a great deal of time reading about Hillers and Powell while doing research for Lasting Light, and I've seen the wild, wonderful photographs that resulted from their journey. What I hadn't seen was one particular picture of Powell as it appeared in my garage-sale book, nestled into a chapter called "Preserving the Vanishing Story of the Indians." The pages were an homage to Powell's poetic adventure and the Native people he encountered.

It seemed strange that I would have discovered this book--about a place where I work and a figure whom I had studied for one of our exhibitions--in a random neighbhoorhood, at a random house, in a random box. But, alas, the universe reminded me that Powell's presence wasn't random at all, that he had served as the director of the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology until his death in 1902. Most importantly, I was reminded that, at a garage sale, anything is possible.

Have YOU ever made an amazing garage-sale discovery? Tell us about on it Twitter with the hashtag #GarageSale.

 

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.