ICYMI: Highlights from the week that was May 13 – May 19, 2018
No one can keep up with everything, so let us do it for you. We’ll gather the top Smithsonian stories from across the country and around the world each week so you’ll never be at a loss for conversation around the water cooler.
This week we learned that the rich really are different from you and me. They have (a lot) more money.
The Hirshhorn’s annual gala took guests way back to the 1980s
The Washington Post, May 13
Don Burke and NPR’s Ari Shapiro pose for a photo Saturday at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s Spring Gala after-party celebrating the 1980s in Washington. (Erin Schaff/Hirshhorn)
For the artsy young people at Saturday night’s gala at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the 1980s were part of the distant past, and so the theme of the evening — the decade when leggings and Donald Trump first flourished (and now they’re ba-ack!) — was pure fantasy. For the older patrons and art lovers, things might have felt a little more familiar.
Whether the era was fondly remembered or learned about through vintage Madonna videos, guests of all ages gladly adopted the motif, which celebrated the museum’s current exhibit “Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s” on one of its featured artists, Jeff Koons. The unusual mixing of new and old guard — they all hit the dance floor and stayed Washington Late — came courtesy of a thorough loosening-up after dinner by a band of … clowns? Stick with us here: The chocolate-delivering circus-style performers were part of an installation by artist Jennifer Rubell, whose participatory works often involve food, and in this case, in addition to handing over the sweets, the performers taught attendees dance moves or otherwise got them acting silly enough to ditch their inhibitions. Read more from Emily Heil for The Washington Post.
DC’s Defunct Corcoran Gallery Announces the New Homes for Over 10,000 Works of Art
The Corcoran has decided who gets art from its $1 billion collection.
ArtNet News, May 14
The Corcoran Gallery of Art. Photo courtesy of Mr.TinDC/Flickr.
The collection of Washington, DC’s shuttered Corcoran Gallery of Art won’t be going far from home. On Monday, four years after the gallery was abruptly closed, trustees of the institution announced how more than 10,000 objects from its original 19,493-object, $1 billion trove will be distributed. To best honor the legacy of the Corcoran, 99.4 percent of the collection will remain in DC.
This week’s massive giveaway—none of the work is being sold—includes paintings by Sam Gilliam, Joan Mitchell, William Merritt Chase, and Helen Frankenthaler; photographs by Ansel Adams, Sally Mann, Dorothea Lange, Julia Margaret Cameron, Eadweard Muybridge, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and Garry Winogrand; sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, Marisol, Nikki de Saint Phalle, and Kiki Smith; and prints by Honoré Daumier, Joseph Goldyne, and George Biddle. Read more from Sarah Cascone for ArtNet News.
Corcoran Gallery Gives More Than 10,000 Artworks to DC Institutions
This week the Corcoran’s board announced that over 99% of the works from the gallery’s collection will stay in DC, with the vast majority going to the museum at American University.
Hyperallergic, May 16
The exterior of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC (photo by Carol M. Highsmith, via Wikimedia Commons)
The saga of the dissolution of the Corcoran Gallery of Art seems to have come to a close, with the remainder of its collection being redistributed this week.
Since 2012, public conflict and private negotiations have taken place over the dissolution of assets held by the Corcoran, one of Washington DC’s legacy institutions. The initial plan to sell the Beaux-Arts building in which the collection resided since its founding in 1897, and relocate the institution to the DC suburbs, was scrapped amid protest; trustees began a search for potential partners to support the goal of remaining in the deteriorating historic location, in need of an estimated $130-million renovation. Read more from Sarah Rose Sharp for Hyperallergic.
Dorothy’s ruby slippers will return to the National Museum of American History on Oct. 19
The Washington Post, May 15
he ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore as Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.”
Click your heels: The popular ruby slippers will go back on view at the National Museum of American History on Oct. 19, 18 months after they were removed for research and conservation.
The artifacts from the 1939 MGM movie “The Wizard of Oz” will be a highlight of an interim display of American popular culture, museum officials said. The permanent cultural galleries, which are closed, will reopen in 2020.
“We wanted to return these to display earlier than that and to bring out other objects from the collection,” spokeswoman Laura Duff said. Read more from Peggy McGlone for The Washington Post.
Philanthropist David Rubenstein reflects on the power of giving money away
The Washington Post Magazine, May 15
Billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein is the co-founder of the Carlyle Group. (Andre Chung/for The Washington Post)
David Rubenstein, 68, is a financier and philanthropist who is co-founder and co-executive chairman of the Carlyle Group, an international private equity firm based in Washington.
You are unimaginably wealthy. Do you face any hardship?
I don’t think if you have the kind of financial situation that I do that I can credibly say I have hardships, because people will laugh or people will throw brickbats. But everybody has problems. So the wealthiest person in the world, Jeff Bezos, your owner, I’m sure he has challenges and problems as well. Many people that I know who are in the Forbes 400 are tortured souls. Most of the people that I know who have accumulated a lot of things but haven’t given away things are not that happy. The people that have given away their time, their energy, their ideas and their money are much happier. Read Joe Helm’s interview: Philanthropist David Rubenstein reflects on the power of giving money away – The Washington Post (pdf)
Elaine de Kooning Broke the Rules by Painting Men—and Secured Her Place in Art History
Artsy.net May 15
Elaine de Kooning. October 21, 1962. (Photo by Carl Gaston/New York Post Archives /(c) NYP Holdings, Inc. via Getty Images)
In 1952, as Willem de Kooning was pouring his energy into paintings of fiendishly faced women, Elaine de Kooning painted a seated portrait of her husband with barely any face at all—no mouth or eyes, just an oval smudge with a mop of gray hair and a black mark in place of his strong brow and nose. As tempting as it might be to read Elaine’s erasure of Willem’s face as marital sparring by paintbrush, the image was far from the only faceless man she painted.
Over the course of her 40-year career, de Kooning painted a wide range of subjects—from bulls and basketball players to cave paintings and Bacchus statues—but portraiture was her passion, and men were her longest-running fascination. Indeed, she painted dozens of them, stripping them of distinguishing features in a way that updated the traditional genre of portraiture with the language of modernism.Read more from Meredith Mendelsohn for Artsy.net.
Urban Odor Maps And Flavor-Changing Spoons: The Cooper Hewitt Shows Why We Need Multisensory Design
Forbes, May 15
At an Oxford University laboratory several years ago, thirty-five undergraduates sampled yoghurt with a variety of spoons. Though the yoghurt was always identical – unflavored and all-natural – students perceived greater sweetness when they used smaller and heavier utensils.
Related studies have found variations in flavor based on differences in cutlery texture, color, and other qualities that have no direct effect on tastebuds. Though psychologists have yet to adequately explain the phenomenon, a designer named Jinhyun Jeon has fancifully applied it to a series of dessert spoons. Currently on view at the Cooper Hewitt, her colorful utensils are elaborately bumped and ridged, and the sensory experience is further enhanced by her use of materials ranging from wood to gold. Read more from Jonathan Keats for Forbes.
An aviation flop led to stamp-collecting history and made the ‘Inverted Jenny’ famous
The Washington Post, May 16
The Smithsonian National Postal Museum owns two of the famous “Inverted Jenny’ stamps, of which there were 100. (Smithsonian National Postal Museum)
It would be the dawn of a new age, intrepid pilots winging into the skies for the first time with the U.S. mail. A letter from Washington could reach Philadelphia in an hour and a half, and New York City in another 90 minutes.
Thousands, including President Woodrow Wilson, planned to be there when the first flight left Washington’s aviation field in Potomac Park to make “aerial history,” on May 15, 1918, 100 years ago Tuesday.
But one man, a 29-year-old stock broker’s clerk and a small-time, “vest pocket” stamp dealer, went to the Post Office instead. Read more from Michale Ruane for The Washington Post.
The Smithsonian Gets an Injection of Super Soldier Serum as Captain America’s Shield Enters Its Collection
It is a prop shield, and not actually made of the mythical metal vibranium.
ArtNet News, May 15
Joe and Anthony Russo with the director’s chairs they used on the set of Avengers: Infinity War (2018).
Just three weeks into its release, Avengers: Infinity War has already become history’s fifth highest grossing movie in America of all time, surpassed at the time of this writing only by Jurassic World, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Titanic, and Avatar. If nothing else, the success shows that the cultural craving for patriotic superhero escapism has truly left its mark on the present.
Earlier this month, in celebration of the release of the film, Disney donated three objects from Marvel productions to the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC: the famous shield wielded by Captain America, and the on-set chairs of Infinity War directors Joe and Anthony Russo. The objects will be included in the museum’s Division of Culture and the Arts. Read more from Taylor Dafoe for ArtNet News.
Some endangered frogs may be leaping back from extinction
The Washington Post, May 17
A harlequin frog. (Brian Gratwicke/Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute)
Variable harlequin frogs (Atelopus various) and many other amphibians in the lush forests of Panama have been slammed by a globe-creeping fungus. The murderous pathogen attacks frogs, toads, salamanders and wormlike creatures called caecilians, and when it reached Panama early in this century the frogs vanished along streams where they had once been abundant. That’s why the scientific community took notice this year when researchers announced that some of the vanished frogs were popping up again.
There’s a simple explanation, potentially, for the apparent comeback: evolution. This might be natural selection working at lightning speed, an example of survival of the fittest frogs.Read more from Joel Achenbach for The Washington Post.
The Most Important Detail from Henrietta Lacks’ Portrait is What’s Missing
Quartzy, May 18
The full portrait of Henrietta Lacks in the National Portrait Gallery (courtesy National Portrait Gallery and National Museum of African American History and Culture)
Henrietta Lacks’s life ended abruptly and painfully. In 1951, at the age of 31, Lacks died in Baltimore, Maryland from an aggressive form of cervical cancer. But her legacy, in the form of a cell line derived from her cancer cells have lived on literally ever since.
While Lacks was seeking treatment at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, her doctors scraped away some of the cells from her tumor and kept them alive and thriving in petri dishes. No other human cells had been able to survive and replicate outside the body at that point in time, which had severely limited scientific research. What came to be called the “HeLa” cell line was essential in the breakthroughs that led to the polio vaccine, as well advances in HIV and cancer treatments. Read more from Katherine Ellen Foley and Anne Quito for Quartzy.
Trump’s donated salary to help fund aviation camp for girls
Politico, May 18
The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos plan to announce this morning that a $100,000 donation from President Donald Trump will help fund a new aviation-focused summer camp for 60 middle school girls from low-income schools. Trump last July donated his second-quarter 2017 salary to the Education Department, which said at the time it would use the money for a “STEM-focused camp for students at the Department of Education.”
The two-week camp, which is free for students, is open to girls in grades six through eight who live in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. It’ll be held this July and August at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the National Air and Space Museum’s companion facility in Northern Virginia. Students will be able to use FAA-certified flight simulators, collaborate with a local flight school and launch a high-altitude weather balloon. Read more from Michael Stratford for Politico.
Infectious disease exhibit shows how hidden bugs create disasters of global proportions
The Washington Times, May 17
At the display on Ebola, museum director Kirk Johnson said, “The presentation in this hall offers a stark demonstration of human suffering that infectious diseases have brought on communities throughout the world.” (Laura Kelly/The Washington Times)
The newest exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History is, in a word, terrifying.
Ebola, Zika, HIV and SARS are just some of the infectious diseases highlighted in “Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World,” where visitors confront conditions that fuel outbreaks and learn about extraordinary efforts to save lives.
From the ceiling hangs a giant mosquito, a not-so-subtle reminder of the insect that has affected the world by spreading Zika, dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya, West Nile virus and other dangerous diseases.Read more from Laura Kelly for the Washington Times.
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Posted: 21 May 2018
Hi Alex – I was interested in reading the article from Joe Helms on David Rubenstein – but it appears to be behind a Washington Post paywall – any chance to see the article without paying?
Tim
Hi Tim–I added the article as a pdf, so you should have no problem accessing it. Thanks for reading!