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Author: Mary Jo Arnoldi Publisher: Smithsonian Institution ISBN: 1935623737 Category : Antiques & Collectibles Languages : en Pages : 506
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
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: 1588346749 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 240
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: Steven Turner Publisher: Smithsonian Institution ISBN: 1588346935 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
Accessible exploration of the noteworthy scientific career of James Smithson, who left his fortune to establish the Smithsonian Institution. James Smithson is best known as the founder of the Smithsonian Institution, but few people know his full and fascinating story. He was a widely respected chemist and mineralogist and a member of the Royal Society, but in 1865, his letters, collection of 10,000 minerals, and more than 200 unpublished papers were lost to a fire in the Smithsonian Castle. His scientific legacy was further written off as insignificant in an 1879 essay published through the Smithsonian fifty years after his death--a claim that author Steven Turner demonstrates is far from the truth. By providing scientific and intellectual context to his work, The Science of James Smithson is a comprehensive tribute to Smithson's contributions to his fields, including chemistry, mineralogy, and more. This detailed narrative illuminates Smithson and his quest for knowledge at a time when chemists still debated thing as basic as the nature of fire, and struggled to maintain their networks amid the ever-changing conditions of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.
Author: Keely Orgeman Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300215185 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 173
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
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
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 : 130
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: Alexandra Bounia Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1040149588 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 214
Book Description
The Ethics of Collecting Trauma offers an interdisciplinary dialogue on the ethics of contemporary museums that are involved in collecting moments of collective trauma. Including a range of international contributions, the volume explores the ethics of collecting material that documents contemporary traumatic events. The case studies focus on four categories of such events: forced migration; terrorism attacks; major natural disasters; and cultural traumas, such as the ongoing legacy of colonization. Contributors consider whether cultural institutions have a right to collect materials about these events and what kind of materials they should focus on, if so; who is being memorialized, who should hold the power to decide what is collected, and what the critical timeline for such initiatives is. The volume also considers what the larger purpose of such collecting is and how to deal with past collecting practices, arguing that museums need to consider, in a careful and deliberate way, their ethical responsibilities as cultural institutions. The Ethics of Collecting Trauma will be of interest to academics and students working in the areas of museum and heritage studies, cultural studies, trauma studies, memory studies, and migration studies. The book will also appeal to museum professionals working around the globe.
Author: Richard Kurin Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0143128159 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 786
Book Description
The Smithsonian Institution is America's largest, most important, and most beloved repository for the objects that define our common heritage. Now Under Secretary for Art, History, and Culture Richard Kurin, aided by a team of top Smithsonian curators and scholars, has assembled a literary exhibition of 101 objects from across the Smithsonian's museums that together offer a marvelous new perspective on the history of the United States. Ranging from the earliest years of the pre-Columbian continent to the digital age, and from the American Revolution to Vietnam, each entry pairs the fascinating history surrounding each object with the story of its creation or discovery and the place it has come to occupy in our national memory. Kurin sheds remarkable new light on objects we think we know well, from Lincoln's hat to Dorothy's ruby slippers and Julia Child's kitchen, including the often astonishing tales of how each made its way into the collections of the Smithsonian. Other objects will be eye-opening new discoveries for many, but no less evocative of the most poignant and important moments of the American experience. Some objects, such as Harriet Tubman's hymnal, Sitting Bull's ledger, Cesar Chavez's union jacket, and the Enola Gay bomber, tell difficult stories from the nation's history, and inspire controversies when exhibited at the Smithsonian. Others, from George Washington's sword to the space shuttle Discovery, celebrate the richness and vitality of the American spirit. In Kurin's hands, each object comes to vivid life, providing a tactile connection to American history. Beautifully designed and illustrated with color photographs throughout, The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects is a rich and fascinating journey through America's collective memory, and a beautiful object in its own right.
Author: Mary Jo Arnoldi
Author: Mary Jo Arnoldi
Author: Smithsonian Institution
Author: Steven Turner
Author: Doug Blandy
Author: Keely Orgeman
Author: Kirsty Gillespie
Author: Alvaro Jarrín
Author: Kylie Message
Author: Alexandra Bounia
Author: Richard Kurin