Some of the best-known 19th-century ledger art was created by Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, and Caddo prisoners of war at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, following the Red River Wars. While many of these drawings depicted battles and traditional ceremonies, others reflected personal stories of relocation. One of these, made in 1875 by the Southern Cheyenne warrior Bear’s Heart, shows a personal journey from the Great Plains to imprisonment in Florida. For the first time in five decades, drawings by Bear’s Heart are going on public view in Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains, opening March 12 at the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian in New York.
A 19th-Century Cheyenne Warrior’s Drawings of His Life as a POW
Field books capture essential information for ecological history but are often difficult to track down in scientific collections. The Field Book Project, launched in 2010 by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution Archives, is an initiative to catalogue field books, track their conservation, and make them accessible online.
How Audubon Pranked a Fellow Naturalist with a Bulletproof Fish
The question of whether or not art museums should be free tends to get people riled up. Last December, Christopher Knight wrote passionately in favor of free admission in the Los Angeles Times, and more recently, the Guardian‘s Jonathan Jones argued just the opposite about museums in the UK. “In tough times, is it better for museums to sell off their treasures, to cut back staff, to shrink and dwindle,” he wrote, “or to charge an entrance fee?”
For her Second Self photography series, Canadian artist Meryl McMaster asked her subjects to blindly draw single-line contour outlines of their faces, which she then sculpted into wire masks. Worn over their skin, all painted a ghostly and theatrical white, the large-scale portraits consider the construction and perception of identity.
WASHINGTON, DC — Out of patent litigation paranoia, inventor Alexander Graham Bell donated copies of his devices and sound recordings directly to the Smithsonian. He had, after all, experienced hundreds of challenges to his telephone patent in 1876. For over a century, most of those recordings when unheard. Recently the Smithsonian collaborated with Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the Library of Congress to harness particle physics technology and retrieve the only known recording of Graham’s voice, released to the public in 2013.
Long-lost between two reefs off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, are the fragmented remains of a Portuguese slave ship, now identified centuries later as the first known wreck of its kind. Ripped apart near the Cape of Good Hope in 1794 while en route to Brazil, the ship carried over 400 enslaved people from Mozambique. More than half were killed in the wreck, and the rescued were resold into slavery.
Remains of 18th-Century Slave Ship Find Safe Harbor at Smithsonian
The question of whether oil giants seek to control the messages at museums they sponsor may have been answered.
The Guardian has obtained several emails exchanged between the Science Museum in London and Shell, which recently became the principal sponsor of the institution’s climate science gallery. They show the company repeatedly making demands about the museum’s exhibitions.
Emails Suggest Shell Pressured Science Museum to Alter Climate Change Exhibits