Category Archives: articles

Through its annual bake-off, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, provides a fun way for the public to engage with its collections Is it cake? Is it art? Is it both? For its third consecutive year, the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin hosted its Great Blanton Bake-Off, and 16 bakersContinue reading “This Museum Is Asking People to Remake Famous Artworks With Cake”

“And as soon as one house was sold,” Sheila Cogan shares, “white flight ensued.” Cogan is one of three people reflecting on the changes that occurred in the southeast D.C. neighborhood after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools in May of 1954. Cogan’s words highlight how the landmark decision reshaped schoolsContinue reading “Black History: Desegregation and D.C.’s Anacostia Neighborhood: Stories from the Community”

Daniel Bachman is on a mission to evoke Virginia’s past through strange medleys of sounds In early 2020, Daniel Bachman stood at the edge of a creek in Falmouth, Virginia, recording the sounds of the insects chittering and buzzing around him. He had come to the creek for the history it held. Nearby, slate-colored markers identified theContinue reading “A Brilliant Folk Musician Turned the Natural Sounds of the Blue Ridge Mountains Into Powerful Songs”

Audre Lorde was born Audrey Geraldine Lorde in New York City to immigrants from Grenada, an island nation in the Caribbean. Considered an intelligent and precocious student, she began writing poetry in high school. After a poem she wrote was rejected for a class assignment, she submitted it to Seventeen magazine and it became her first professional publication.Continue reading “Black History: Audre Lorde”

This year, the Institution collected everything from the stunning shell of an extinct cephalopod to a Blue Origin rocket booster Each year, the Smithsonian Institution—the world’s largest museum, education and research complex—grows in its holdings, one fascinating object after another. The highest-profile additions to the Smithsonian in 2024, garnering headlines worldwide, were the two giant pandas thatContinue reading “Eleven Fascinating Acquisitions That Joined the Smithsonian’s Vast Collections in 2024”