CANVAS - Alice Gerrard

"Bluegrass icon Alice Gerrard on her trailblazing career" PBS NewsHour 11/19/2022

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SUMMARY:  With their unique harmonies, the bluegrass duo of Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard blazed trails for female folk singers in the 1960s and ‘70s.  They were also civil rights activists who used their music to speak out politically.  To celebrate the pair's legacy, last month the Smithsonian released a selection of remastered versions of their music.  Ali Rogin speaks to Gerrard about her career.

 

Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard — Long Black Veil

SMITHSONIAN - Helping America's Identity

"Lonnie Bunch on how the Smithsonian can help America understand its identity" PBS NewsHour 7/18/2019

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SUMMARY:  Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, has just become the 14th head of the Smithsonian Institution -- and its first black leader.  He sits down with Judy Woodruff to discuss the challenges facing the world’s largest museum and research complex and why the Smithsonian is as much about today and tomorrow as it is about the past.

SMITHSONIAN - Renovated Hall of Fossils

"At Smithsonian’s renovated Hall of Fossils, dinosaurs are just the beginning" PBS NewsHour 5/31/2019

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SUMMARY:  The dinosaur bones at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History now boast new accommodations.  After a four-year, $125 million renovation, the Hall of Fossils now features state-of-the-art technology and new exhibits housing more than 700 specimens.  As William Brangham reports, it also offers lessons about connecting the present to the past.

NEWSHOUR SHARES - Apollo 11 Command Module Traveling Show

"Keeping priceless pieces of space history safe" PBS NewsHour 10/20/2017

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SUMMARY:  In our NewsHour Shares moment of the day, nearly five decades after the historic Apollo 11 Command Module brought man to the moon and back, the spacecraft is part of a new adventure in a four-stop traveling exhibition across America.  The NewsHour's Julia Griffin gets a behind-the-scenes look at how the Smithsonian has choreographed a safe trip for the module.

NEWSHOUR ARTS - Yayoi Kusama

"Need to escape reality?  Step into infinity with Yayoi Kusama" PBS NewsHour 3/10/2017

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SUMMARY:  At the Hirshhorn Museum, visitors are lining up to experience Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama's world of whimsy, color, shapes and a peek into the beyond.  Jeffrey Brown tells us why this new exhibit is currently the toughest ticket in Washington, D.C.

ART - The Sculptor

"Depicting colonialism and globalization through art ‘full of contradiction'" PBS NewsHour 1/12/2017

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SUMMARY:  A “Wind Sculpture” by visual artist Yinka Shonibare MBE was recently installed in front of the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.  It's the seventh in Shonibare's series of vibrantly colored and patterned public artworks that are made of fiberglass, but look like cloth.  Jeffrey Brown talks to Shonibare about his interest in depicting globalization and what he asks of his viewers.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  On a recent morning in Washington, D.C., this wind sculpture was lifted in and installed outside the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.  It's the latest in a series of public art works on display around the world by the artist Yinka Shonibare.

YINKA SHONIBARE MBE, Artist:  It's a freestanding sculpture, but it's a very dynamic sculpture, and it's very colorful.  And, also, it's deceptive, because, from a distance, it feels like it's actually soft material.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Playful, deceptive, full of contradiction, the stuff of Shonibare's works, most of all the sculptures for which he's best known, colonial-style figures, some headless, some with globes for heads, in brightly colored African-style costumes.

YINKA SHONIBARE MBE:  Actually, my work is really breaking down stereotypes, saying, you know what?  What you see is not necessarily what you get.  So, you might actually want to take time to find out more about something before you then start to make assumptions about it.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Shonibare himself is a mix of identities.  Born in London in 1962, he moved to his family's homeland in Nigeria at three years old, and then returned to London to study fine art.

At 19, he contracted a viral infection in his spine that left him partially paralyzed.  He also began to see his way forward as an artist, through an unintentionally provocative question that came from a teacher.

YINKA SHONIBARE MBE:  One of my teachers said, why aren't you making authentic African art?  I felt that, actually, what's authentic African art, or what's authentic identity in a global, modern world?

And so those questions have been with me since.  And I have explored those questions in many ways.

ART - Conversation With the Crosbys

"Cosbys host ‘conversation’ of African-American artworks at the Smithsonian" PBS NewsHour 11/11/2014

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GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  A usually private collection of African-American art went on public display for the first time this week in Washington.  And the collectors making the art available are better known than the art itself.

I sat down with them last week.

It started with two friends talking about art.  One, Johnnetta Cole, is the director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.  The other, Camille Cosby, an art collector, philanthropist and, as it happens, the wife of comedian Bill Cosby.

Persuaded that there was a connection between the sculptures and paintings that define African art and the quilts, abstracts and carvings that African-Americans had created out of and since slavery, they set out to combine them.  The result, an extensive new exhibit titled “Conversations,” combining the Cosbys’ African-American collection and the museum’s African one, works with common themes, ranging from the spiritual to the political.

Many of the American artists, from Romare Bearden to Henry Ossawa Tanner, are well-known. Most of the African artists, from Senegal to South Africa to Nigeria, are not.  But, side by side, the works mirror one another, a shared experience of memory and family, of nature, of music.

A massive marble Elizabeth Catlett sculpture commissioned by Bill for Camille features a couple in an embrace, with the faces of their children engraved on the woman’s shoulder.

In its shadow stand two mid-20th century male and female wooden figures from Cote d’Ivoire. Another juxtaposition, a 1978 painting “Benin Head” by American artist David Driskell, and a copper and iron commemorative head of a king from Benin made in the 18th century.

The works are soaring and small, colorful and spare.

Camille and Bill Cosby joined me at the African Art Museum to talk about it all.

ART - Video Games As Art

"'The Art of Video Games' at the Smithsonian American Art Museum" PBS Newshour 4/4/2012

"The Art of Video Games" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum is one of the first exhibitions to explore the 40-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium. Featuring 80 games and 20 video games systems, starting with the Atari VCS in 1976 and ending with today's Sony PlayStation 3, the exhibit walks through the tremendous advances in design, technology and storytelling.

Last year, the museum invited the public to help select the video games to be included in the exhibition. From a list of 240 games chosen by guest curator Chris Melissinos, who worked with the museum, game developers, designers, industry pioneers and journalists, more than 3.7 million votes were cast (by 119,000 people in 175 countries) to choose the 80 games.

Art Beat talked to Melissinos about the exhibit, which runs through Sept. 30.

So why exactly are there are video games in an art museum?

Chris Melissinos: The answer in my opinion is very simple. Video games are an amalgam of what we consider to be traditional art. Within video games we see illustration, narrative, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, and all of these things conspire to create a form of art whose output is greater than the individuals parts. It is has never been a question that video games would be in art museum; it was at what point would we see them. And here we are today.

Who then are the artists? What kinds of skills or talents go into making this art form?

Chris Melissinos: When we look at video games, depending on the era, the term artist could be defined in different ways. In the earliest form of video games, the programmer was typically not only the programmer but the artist and the designer and the musician and the coder, and would even do the artwork on the boxes of these particular games. Today, video games, because of their complexity, because of their ability to tell very large, grand stories, we may see teams of artists and designers and developers of 200 or more working toward the goal of a single vision. So much like you would see a very large movie by Steven Spielberg -- it was not just Steven Spielberg who created the movie. There are other artists and people with vision who were in concert with Steven to bring those forward. It is not that different for the largest and most expansive video games that we see today.

So many of the people that are creating video games today are just like you and me. They are everyone. They are everywhere. I think the democratization of tools have allowed for the platforms for game development to exist at the hands of just about anyone. And while many game developers may not be a household name yet, there certainly some who are. So designers like Shigeru Miyamoto, anybody who grew up playing Mario in any of its forms could probably tell you who Shigeru Miyamoto is. So, again, while we do not have necessarily the artists as front and center of the experience that people have in their home, they are certainly present and there many more than people believe.

In an art museum you see different kinds of art. There is realism, expressionism, abstract art, surrealism and on so. Within the genre of video games, are there different kinds of art that you see?

Chris Melissinos: Within video games one may discover many different types of traditional art. From surrealism in games like "Myst," to woodcarving and painting such as in "Okami," to abstract art to photo realism. You can take a look at the earliest games, because the technology was so limited and the power of those platforms were so anemic, that the developer had to work in very abstract terms to convey the mystery of the story that they wanted to impart. Which meant that the player had to go ahead and bring their imagination to fill in the void, to fill in the gaps the technology did not provide for the narrative to occur. You can find just about every form of traditional art reflected in video games today.

What is the relationship between the artwork, or the video game, and the person who plays the game?

Chris Melissinos: Video games become art through distinct voices. The first voice of a video game is that of the author, the artist or the designer. They have a story that they want to tell the world. The second voice in games is that of the game itself. How it presents itself to the player, the mechanics of that game, the possibility of space that the game provides to the player. But it becomes art in the playing of the game and that's where the third voice, the voice of the player comes in. Because what video games allow to occur is a narrative arc that retains the authority of an author or a storyteller, but allows us as players to laterally explore the environment, to pull bits of the game out that are personal to us, that are important to us and thereby creating a unique form of art for each individual person who plays.

What makes one game more artistic than another? What are the qualities that stand out?

Chris Melissinos: In my opinion, the term art is a very subjective term. It means something very different to anyone that tries to apply it to works of beauty and in their life. My definition is quite serviceable for myself, which is quiet simply to say if you can discover an author's intent in the work that you are observing and find personal resonance with that message, then it transcends the medium to become art. So it's very difficult to say which games are art, which games are not art. It will be different for everyone that observes it. This exhibition does not attempt to draw a line in the sand and say video games are art. I leave that for you to decide whether or not you believe video games to be art in your life.

One of the main differences of having video games in an art museum is the interactive aspect. You can't touch a painting, but you can play a video game.

Chris Melissinos: One of the things that you can expect in visiting an exhibition like this is to be fully engaged in the experience. The art is in the playing. That is when video games transcend just the medium to become art. It was important to engage the visitors in this exhibition and allow them to go ahead and project themselves into the games that they've enjoyed playing. So we have games that allow you to sample an era, that did something different to propel video games forward, to propel design change, to make people think differently about video games within their era. We also provide materials that help to illuminate the artists' intent, to illuminate the story that may be behind the veneer that may not be so apparent when you first played it at home.

How did you pick the games and the game systems?

Chris Melissinos: What I wanted to do was illustrate the impact that video games have had as an art form in American culture over its 40 year existence. I couldn't create an entire historical compendium of every machine and every game that spans those 40 years, so what instead we picked 20 systems that really stood as anchors within their respective generations, ones that the public would most identify with. Through those 20 systems we demonstrated four games of particular genres that then showed the evolution of the form of art over time. Instead of just picking 80 games, which would have been my favorite 80 picks over 40 years, I decided to make sure that we had the voice of the public represented. This is not just about my love of gaming and the art form, but about the United States' and the world's love for the form as well.

AMERICA - National Shame in the Making?

"After its last flight, Discovery may be homeless" by Robert Z. Pearlman, Space.com 11/1/2010

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Space shuttle Discovery is ready to fly its final flight this week, but where it will make its last landing is still up in the air.

Long thought destined for the Smithsonian, NASA's oldest flying orbiter may actually end up elsewhere unless the Washington, D.C. institution can find the millions of dollars needed to prepare Discovery for delivery and display, collectSPACE.com has learned.

POLITICS - Brave New Bush World, Cowards Does Make

"Smithsonian toned down exhibit on climate change in the Arctic" Associated Press, Herald Tribune

The Smithsonian Institution toned down an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic for fear of angering the U.S. Congress and the Bush administration, says a former administrator at the museum.

Among other things, the script, or official text, of last year's exhibit was rewritten to minimize and inject more uncertainty into the relationship between global warming and humans, said Robert Sullivan, who was associate director in charge of exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Also, officials omitted scientists' interpretation of some research and let visitors draw their own conclusions from the data, he said. In addition, graphs were altered "to show that global warming could go either way," Sullivan said.

"It just became tooth-pulling to get solid science out without toning it down," said Sullivan, who resigned last fall after 16 years at the museum. He said he left after higher-ups tried to reassign him.

Smithsonian officials denied that political concerns influenced the exhibit, saying the changes were made for reasons of objectivity. And some scientists who consulted on the project said nothing major was omitted.

Sullivan said that to his knowledge, no one in the Bush administration pressured the Smithsonian, whose $1.1 billion (€0.82 billion) budget is mostly taxpayer-funded.

Rather, he said, Smithsonian leaders acted on their own. "The obsession with getting the next allocation and appropriation was so intense that anything that might upset the Congress or the White House was being looked at very carefully," he said.

Yap, in other words the Smithsonian "leaders" have become cowards because this dictatorial Bush Administration hold the purse-strings. To hell with science and lets present a "balanced" view. Of course Bush gets to define what "balanced" is, like Global Warming is not real.

HOGWASH!