affiliates in the news: week of november 16

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news

Congratulations to all the Affiliates making headlines this week.

CALIFORNIA
Discovery Science Center (Santa Ana)
Building a love of science

Arts Council for Long Beach (Long Beach)
Antonio Pedro Ruiz To Receive Arts Council Award

Chabot Space and Science Center (Oakland)
Chabot Debunks 2010 Predictions
What’s Up at Chabot: Full-dome show explores Mayans’ astrological contributions

GEORGIA
High Museum of Art (Atlanta)
High Names Michael Rooks New Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
High Museum picks new mod art curator
Michael Rooks Joins High Museum Of Art

INDIANA
Conner Prairie (Fishers)
Conner Prairie Faring Well During Downturn

LOUISIANA
National WWII Museum (New Orleans)
War’s story told on film

MONTANA
Western Heritage Center (Billings)
Tourism grant awarded to Heritage Center

Museum of the Rockies (Bozeman) and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History
The Top 8 Dinosaur Discoveries of 2009
New Dinosaur Extinction
FOR KIDS: The paleontologist and the three dinosaurs
Skulls thought to be from three different dinosaurs may actually be from the same dino type at three different ages
Former reptile wrangler now wins awards for fossil photos

NORTH CAROLINA
Charlotte Museum of History (Charlotte)
Day of songs, dancing and storytelling: American Indian Heritage Month celebration teaches ‘we are one tribe.’

OREGON
Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum (McMinnville)
FLIR donates high tech display to Evergreen Aviation Museum

PENNSYLVANIA
Senator John Heinz History Center (Pittsburgh)
Hop a ride through the region’s past as ‘Railroad Town’

RHODE ISLAND
Heritage Harbor Museum (Providence)
Backers of Providence’s Heritage Harbor hopeful despite funding setbacks

SOUTH CAROLINA
South Carolina State Museum (Columbia)
State Museum Expansion Project Looks to Local Governments

WASHINGTON
Whatcom Museum (Bellingham)
Whatcom Museum Opens The Lightcatcher: New $18.3 Million Facility
Lightcatcher grand opening

Wing Luke Asian Museum (Seattle) and Arab American National Museum (Dearborn, Michigan)
Exhibits of Conscience: A nationwide initiative pulls museums into one of today’s most highly charged issues: immigration

Well done!

sleepless in seattle

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There is so much going on at Smithsonian Affiliates in and around Seattle that one can hardly sleep.  Of course being in the heart of America’s coffee capital only adds to this condition.

Entrance to the Museum of Flight

Entrance to the Museum of Flight

This trip started on November 12 at the Museum of Flight, a sparkling and sprawling Affiliate, just south of the city, appropriately recognized as the world’s largest private not-for-profit air and space museum.  Under the dynamic leadership of Bonnie Dunbar, five-time space shuttle astronaut, the museum hosts such remarkables as the first Boeing 747, Air Force One, and a supersonic Concorde.  Astronaut John Young’s spacesuit and various examples of space food, on loan from the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), are also on display in the main building.  I was pleased to run into Dan Hagedorn, formerly of NASM and now senior curator at the museum. Dan’s voluminous knowledge of aircraft and aviation history kept me spellbound for hours. I think of Dan as our permanent loan to the museum.  He is complemented by an enthusiastic set of colleagues who, like the pioneers of flight, are continually dreaming up new ways to expand the museum’s innovative exhibitions and education programs.  Soar on!

A striking installation at the Wing Luke Asian Museum

A striking installation at the Wing Luke Asian Museum

The Wing Luke Asian Museum, in the heart of Seattle’s International District, flies to the heart of Seattle’s complex history as a home for generations of Asian and Pacific Island Americans.  The small community museum led for many years by visionary Ron Chew, and now directed by the equally inspiring Beth Takekawa, recently reopened around the corner in a not so small historic building, brilliantly transformed by the architectural firm Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen.  The renovation allows for contemporary art and community culture displays while preserving the original spaces occupied by workers, family associations, and merchants.  On view at this time are Roger Shimomura’s provocative and disturbing  “yellow terror” artifacts and his paintings that explore and expose the cruelty and harm of stereotyping.

The new Light Catcher building of the Whatcom Museum of History and Art

The new Lightcatcher building of the Whatcom Museum of History and Art

About ninety miles up the coast, in Bellingham, Washington stands the Whatcom Museum of History and Art, an important repository of Northwest  history and culture, and the ultimate destination of this trip. On November 13 the Whatcom celebrated the opening of it new “Lightcatcher” building, an exquisite facility, also designed by Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects, that will rehouse the museum’s art collection and showcase new collections and acquisitions.  It was an honor to join director Patricia Leach, Mayor Dan Pike, the Board and all the local supporters in applauding this great community accomplishment. Bellingham was famous as the jumping off point for the great Alaska gold rush, but the hard work of many in this city, has unearthed the local gold of good will and artistic creativity.  We are delighted that the Smithsonian American Art Museum‘s very relevant exhibition, 1934: A New Deal for the Arts, will be the featured jewel at the Whatcom in 2010.  

Smithsonian Affiliates in Seattle and Bellingham offer so many amazing opportunities for learning and discovery, that what I lacked for in sleep I made up for in inspiration.  Pour me another cup of coffee!

musings from the new england museum association

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SI Astrophysical Observatory's Black Holes exhibition, on view at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, NH

SI Astrophysical Observatory's Black Holes exhibition, on view at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, NH

One of the most interesting questions I heard asked at the New England Museum Association conference last week was, what’s the new non-profit normal?   There was a sense that both retrenching and rethinking are in order, but that steering museums through these turbulent times will produce changes that will last far beyond the economic crisis and our eventual recovery.

The new director of Affliate Plimoth Plantation (Plymouth, MA), offered one such road map.  It’s hyper-attentive visitor experience, and a zero tolerance for unsatisfactory comments.  One of the results of recent visitor surveys at Plimoth revealed that 93% of their visitors report a very satisfactory experience.  Pretty good right?!  Except for director Ellie Donovan, a missionary for high-quality visitor experience in every regard.  She recognizes that the other 7% represent 25,000 people who are not shopping in the store for things to remember a bad experience, and are not saying nice things to their friends.  In short, that 7% represent thousands of dollars of potentially lost revenue, that no museum or historical site can stand to lose.  A powerful argument.     

The keynote speaker at NEMA made a nuanced plea for new non-profit normal too, that is, how museums need to step up to their role as builders of social capital in a community.  Social capital is a metric, measured by community and state by such statistics as the number of active voters, volunteerism, crime rates, even TV-watching rates (a negative indicator).  Unsurprisingly, his research has shown that, the higher the social capital, the higher are other rates of happiness indicators – education achievement, lower incarceration rates, etc.  Lewis Feldstein, President of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, challenged all the museum professionals present to ask themselves how their organizations are building social capital.  Do new immigrants come to your museum to learn about the community’s history or cultural activity?  Do local civic groups call you to use your facilities for meetings?  Is your staff serving on community boards, active and visible members of civic life in your city?  All (and more) are important questions for establishing the relevancy of museums to the contexts of their communities.

But not all the discussions at the conference were that deep and soul-searching.  I was lucky to see Black Holes: Space Warps and Time Twists, an exhibition organized by the Smithsonian’s Astrophysical Observatory, at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, NH.  (Ok, how many knew that Christa McAuliffe was a high school social studies teacher from Concord, NH High School?  Or that the quote, “I touch the future, I teach,” was hers?!)  It was a wonderfully interactive exhibit with a variety of media stations that allow the visitor to weigh black holes and dive into them, among other activities.    And I met the young enthusiastic safari-clad staff of scvngr – a do-it-yourself interface template for creating location-based, high-tech, mobile games.  So very fun.

Overall, a very pleasant, thought-provoking week in New England.  How about you – what’s the chatter at your regional association or museum?

Coming up in Affiliateland

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SITES' exhibition on White House gardens, opening in Illinois.

What’s going on at Affiliates in November?

MARYLAND:  Staff of the B & O Railroad Museum in Baltimore receive training with educators from the Smithsonian’s Early Enrichment Center, 11.5.

The Reginald F. Lewis Museum sponsors a “Get on the Bus” tour from D.C. to Baltimore,  featuring SITES’ project director Marquette Folley,  11.7.

ILLINOIS:  The  Jeweled Objects of Desire exhibition featuring 43 objects from the gem and minerals collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History opens at the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art in Elmhurst, 11.7.

The Dixon Historic Center opens SITES’ The White House Garden exhibition in Dixon, 11.14.

NEW HAMPSHIRE:  Outreach Manager Jennifer Brundage will be attending the New England Museum Association conference in Nashua, 11.11-14.

Rubin Museum finds rare treasures in Smithsonian library

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Thanks to the Rubin Museum of Art’s curatorial assistant Tracey Friedman for this guest post.  Here, Tracey explains what happened when she came to Washington to research medieval cosmology in the Smithsonian’s Dibner Library for their upcoming exhibit, Visions of the Cosmos.    

Rubin Museum curatorial assistant Tracey Friedman researches medieval cosmology at Smithsonian Library.

Rubin Museum curatorial assistant Tracey Friedman researches medieval cosmology at the Smithsonian's Dibner Library.

We started with the questions:  How did we come to be? What is beyond the earth? How did the universe begin? How has man conceived of his place in the universe throughout history? The human condition is marked by an awareness of a mortal self and a curiosity about the surrounding world, giving rise to certain questions that have been answered by myths, philosophies, and mathematics.  The Rubin Museum of Art’s (RMA) upcoming exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, will explore the different systems, both religious and scientific, that have developed in Eastern and Western cultures to explain man’s relationship to the universe.

 As the curatorial assistant for this exhibition, I was charged with providing the research for the Western portion of the show. I had help from a greatly accomplished astrophysicist in putting together a preliminary list of potential objects, but it wasn’t nearly enough to narrate the Western tale of the cosmos.

We turned to the Smithsonian.  As a new Affiliate, we relied on the help of our liaison, Jennifer, to set up the appropriate avenues to research a new subject area. She believed the best outlet to meet our needs was the Dibner Library. I was a bit skeptical because I had never heard of this library and felt the allure of other more well-known Smithsonian museums and research centers. Jennifer sent me a list of relevant books held by the Dibner, available from their online catalog (another great resource for Affiliates). I had a list of remarkable pieces to start with, many of which were housed at the Dibner itself, inside the National Museum of American History. I decided that I needed to see these pieces for myself and find the images that would illustrate our story.

Within two weeks I had an appointment and traveled the four-and-a-half hours to Washington D.C. When I arrived, the staff at the Dibner Library had all of the books I requested, and more, set out for me. To my pleasant surprise, the librarians took my topic and ran with it. I was presented with numerous books dealing with an assortment of corresponding themes that they had extracted from my original list. I was impressed by the effort that had been put into this scholarly search, and thankfully, one of the librarians explained their research strategies and rationale with me upon my arrival. I was then led into the cozy, dimly-lit reading room and sat down with my pile of books for the rest of the day. Each time I reached the maximum limit of books allowed in the room, the pile would rotate out for an equally large stack. I was thumbing through each of the books, making notes and marking pages of interest. Instead of drawing my typical makeshift renderings of the images, the librarian made a copy of the pages I selected. I was elated.

I am so pleased with the final selection of books that we are borrowing from the Dibner for our show. The section of the show I researched will trace how Western medieval anthropocentric cosmology, which envisioned humans at the center of a static universe, was replaced in the Renaissance by a heliocentric universe, giving rise to our present, evolving astrophysical worldview. Among the 6 rare books we borrowed from the Smithsonian are texts ranging from the 10th – 17th centuries, representing great scientists and philosophers such as Galileo, Oronce Finé, and Joannes de Sacro Bosco.

My experience made it clear that my institution’s new affiliation with the Smithsonian will be a great tool for us.   I hope that my experience inspires other Affiliates to create similar partnerships and take advantage of smaller Smithsonian entities like the Dibner Library.

To read more stories about discoveries and collections at the Smithsonian’s network of 20 libraries, check out their blog and website.

the sky’s the limit at NASM

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What do an object loan coordinator, digitized posters, a public observatory and a virtual conference have in common? All are opening the collections and resources of the National Air and Space Museum in new and exciting ways!

Hunter Hollins,

Hunter Hollins, loan coordinator, space history

New Loan Coordinator: Hunter Hollins

Hunter joined the Space History Division of the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in May of this year.  With almost 20 years of experience working with museums to manage exhibitions of art and artifacts of cultural heritage, Hunter is excited to help Affiliates get the most from their relationship with the NASM. He’s currently working with the Challenger Space Center, a Smithsonian Affiliate in Peoria, Arizona, on a loan of artifacts related to life in space. There’s some surprising items on the list- including “ChapStick” (to ensure the astronauts’ comfort) and fishing line and hooks, in case they had too much time floating in the Pacific Ocean when they returned!

Hunter works closely with borrowers to maintain our national treasures while on exhibit so they can be enjoyed and studied by generations to come.

NASM’s “Fly Now!” Poster Collection online

 

At the end of this summer, staff at NASM achieved a milestone: they had photographed, scanned and catalogued most of the museum’s collection of 1,300 posters.  The posters, which date from 1827 and include contemporary examples, are available for the first time online.  View them here.

 

Amelia Brakeman Kile, an intern who worked on the project, said that their efforts will allow scholars to “contribute to knowledge, study and discussion of this valuable resource.”  Read more in her blog post.

 

NASM's telescope, on loan from Harvard

NASM's telescope, on loan from Harvard

Harvard on the Mall: NASM Opens a Public Observatory
400 years ago, Galileo made the first recorded astronomical observations with a telescope. To commemorate his achievement, NASM opened a public observatory on the National Mall. The observatory features a 16 inch, 3,000 pound telescope on loan from the Harvard College Observatory. During daylight hours, visitors can view the moon, bright stars and planets, and with a special filter, the sun. And, for the next three months, visitors can see the Smithsonian Dibner Library’s first edition of Galileo’s “Sidereus Nuncius” after they view the heavens.

Apollo Space Program Virtual Conference for Educators

Join experts from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum for the Apollo Space Program Virtual Conference, a FREE one-day online conference on Tuesday, November 10. Forty years ago the Apollo Space Program met President Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon, one of the most significant achievements of the 20th Century. Join experts as they present the challenges of the Apollo Program and examine the remarkable technologies that made the moon landings possible.  Click here for session details and registration .