A proud native of Washington, D.C., Salima Appiah-Duffell calls her new art library roving position the beginning of her “second career.” She splits her time between the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery Library and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library. Prior to coming to the Smithsonian, Salima served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi and worked as a program analyst at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Category: Art and Design
Black Friday is upon us! The day American retailers look forward to all year long, expecting a surge in purchases as customers prepare for holiday gift-giving. But if you’re not interested in braving the crowded shopping malls (in fact, we hope you’re reading this in a comfy chair with a plate of leftovers!), consider gifting your loved ones with something you can purchase from home and that benefits generations to come. Take a look at our Adopt-A-Book offerings!
This post was submitted by Susan Frampton, program coordinator, Smithsonian Libraries.
Serendipity: happy chance; lucky chance; happenstance; and good fortune.
Any and all of those words could be used to describe my encounter, collaboration and friendship with Andy Stern, executive director, and Todd McGrain, artist, sculptor and creative director, of The Lost Bird Project. My good luck began during an online image search for the Smithsonian Libraries’ exhibition Once There Were Billions: Vanished Birds of North America in September 2013; little did I know then that the exhibition would take on a very big dimension.
The blog post, first of three, was written by Xavier Courouble, research assistant for Sailors and Daughters: Early Photography and the Indian Ocean, an online exhibition part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art’s Connecting the Gems of the Indian Ocean: From Oman to East Africa.
Recovering from loss of empire following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the French sought to re-establish commerce and colonies in the Indian Ocean. The task fell to Charles Guillain, who led a French expedition to the Swahili coast of Eastern Africa in 1846-1848. Our record of his travels is enshrined in a magisterial 3-volume work Documents sur l’histoire, la géographie, et le commerce de l’Afrique orientale and the accompanying atlas folio of engravings and maps, Voyage à la côte orientale d’Afrique.
The Smithsonian Libraries has digitized the complete work of the volumes held by the Warren M. Robbins Library at the National Museum of African Art.
The Smithsonian Libraries and Smithsonian Gardens present The Lost Bird Project, an exhibition by artist Todd McGrain, open through May 2015. This project recognizes the tragedy of modern extinction by immortalizing North American birds that have been driven to extinction. It features large-scale bronze sculptures of the Carolina parakeet, the Labrador duck, the great auk, the heath hen, and the passenger pigeon. Four of the sculptures are located in the Enid A. Haupt Garden, a 4.2-acre public rooftop garden between the Smithsonian Castle and Independence Avenue. The fifth sculpture, the passenger pigeon, is in the Urban Habitat Garden at the National Museum of Natural History. This post is written by Todd McGrain, Author, Sculptor, and Creative Director of The Lost Bird Project. Hear Todd speak at our free event on November 20th!
The weekend of September 25-28th art enthusiasts, bibliophiles, the simply curious made their way to the annual NY Art Book Fair. Held at MoMA’s PS1 in Long Island City, Queens; this year’s event featured more than 350 artists, booksellers, and independent publishers hailing from 28 countries. Last year’s fair attracted a crowd of 27,000.
In July 2015, the Smithsonian Libraries will debut an exciting new exhibit in our Exhibition Gallery in the National Museum of American History. “Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction, 1780-1910” will explore the relationship between emerging scientific theories and fiction writers of the period. Although the “Fantastic Worlds” is many months away, we’ve recently launched a t-shirt campaign through TFund so that you can own an awesome piece of imagery from the exhibit and support programming for it!