But what will she do when all the other stars come tumbling out of the painting, too? Will Katie be able to catch the stars before the gallery guard notices they've floated away? This picture book features The Starry Night, Noon, Vincent's Chair, Fishing Boats on the Beach, and The Olive Grove.

    Now Under Secretary for Art, History, and Culture Richard Kurin, aided by a team of top Smithsonian curators and scholars, has assembled a literary exhibition of 101 objects from across the Smithsonian's museums that together offer a marvelous new perspective on the history of the United States.Ranging from the earliest years of the pre-Columbian continent to the digital age, and from the American Revolution to Vietnam, each entry pairs the fascinating history surrounding each object with the story of its creation or discovery and the place it has come to occupy in our national memory. Kurin sheds remarkable new light on objects we think we know well, from Lincoln's hat to Dorothy's ruby slippers and Julia Child's kitchen, including the often astonishing tales of how each made its way into the collections of the Smithsonian. Other objects will be eye-opening new discoveries for many, but no less evocative of the most poignant and important moments of the American experience. Some objects, such as Harriet Tubman's hymnal, Sitting Bull's ledger, Cesar Chavez's union jacket, and the Enola Gay bomber, tell difficult stories from the nation's history, and inspire controversies when exhibited at the Smithsonian. Others, from George Washington's sword to the space shuttle Discovery, celebrate the richness and vitality of the American spirit. In Kurin's hands, each object comes to vivid life, providing a tactile connection to American history.Beautifully designed and illustrated with color photographs throughout, The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects is a rich and fascinating journey through America's collective memory, and a beautiful object in its own right.

    Each piece of art evokes something new inside of her: silliness, curiosity, joy, and ultimately inspiration. When confronted with an empty white canvas, she is energized to create and express herself—which is the greatest feeling of all. With exuberant illustrations by Peter H. Reynolds, The Museum playfully captures the many emotions experienced through the power of art, and each child’s unique creative process. Praise for The Museum "Verde and Reynolds deliver a simple premise with a charming payoff… this “twirly-whirly” homage to a museum is, on balance, a sweet-natured and handsome celebration." —Kirkus Reviews "Debut author Verde makes an engaging case for understanding art as an experience rather than an object." —Publishers Weekly "The rhymed text captures the excitement of a being sparked by art.” —Booklist "Communicates a fresh, playful, childlike perspective on art and normalizes childlike responses to it. The idea that posing, laughing, and curious questions are all appropriate museum behavior may be a new one for both children and parents, and knowing this is sure to make for more enjoyable museum visits." —School Library Journal "For parents who have trouble communicating the excitement of art to their children, The Museum can serve as the starting point for a conversation. The book is also a wonderful reminder of visual art’s power to encourage and empower self-expression. Children and adults will finish this book excited about their next art experience, and perhaps tempted to dance through the halls of a museum in the near future." —Bookpage "This playful picture book pays tribute to the joyous effect art can have on the viewer." —Shelf-Awareness

    Join 150+ makers as they share the stories behind their beautiful and bold work—and use the special conductive ink on the cover to do some tinkering yourself!Brought to you by the Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio.

    If the “War Between the States” was the test of the young republic’s commitment to its founding precepts, it was also a watershed in photographic history, as the camera recorded the epic, heartbreaking narrative from beginning to end—providing those on the home front, for the first time, with immediate visual access to the horrors of the battlefield.Photography and the American Civil War features both familiar and rarely seen images that include haunting battlefield landscapes strewn with bodies, studio portraits of armed Confederate and Union soldiers (sometimes in the same family) preparing to meet their destiny, rare multi-panel panoramas of Gettysburg and Richmond, languorous camp scenes showing exhausted troops in repose, diagnostic medical studies of wounded soldiers who survived the war’s last bloody battles, and portraits of both Abraham Lincoln and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth.Published on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg (1863), this beautifully produced book features Civil War photographs by George Barnard, Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan, and many others.

    According to Kaiser, successful arts organizations pursue strong programmatic marketing campaigns that compel people to buy tickets, enroll in classes, and so on—in short, to participate in the organization’s programs. Additionally, they create exciting activities that draw people to the organization as a whole. This institutional marketing creates a sense of enthusiasm that attracts donors, board members, and volunteers. Kaiser calls this group of external supporters the family. When this hidden engine is humming, staff, board, and audience members, artists, and donors feel confidence in the future. Resources are reinvested in more and better art, which is marketed aggressively; as a result, the “family” continues to grow, providing even more resources. This self-reinforcing cycle underlies the activities of all healthy arts organizations, and the theory behind it can be used as a diagnostic tool to reveal—and remedy—the problems of troubled ones. This book addresses each element of the cycle in the hope that more arts organizations around the globe—from orchestras, theaters, museums, opera companies, and classical and modern dance organizations to service organizations and other not-for-profit cultural institutions—will be able to sustain remarkable creativity, pay the bills, and have fun doing so!

    Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer sheds new light on the war by examining fifty objects from the New-York Historical Society’s acclaimed collection. A daguerreotype of an elderly, dignified ex-slave, whose unblinking stare still mesmerizes; a soldier’s footlocker still packed with its contents; Grant’s handwritten terms of surrender at Appomattox—the stories these objects tell are rich, poignant, sometimes painful, and always fascinating. They illuminate the conflict from all perspectives—Union and Confederate, military and civilian, black and white, male and female—and give readers a deeply human sense of the war. With an introduction from Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Foner and more than eighty photographs, The Civil War in 50 Objects is the perfect companion for readers and history fans to commemorate the 150th anniversaries of both the Battle of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

    Trade textiles blended the traditional designs, skills, and tastes of their cultures of origin, with new techniques learned through global exchange, creating beautiful new works that are also historically fascinating. Interwoven Globe is the first book to analyze these textiles within the larger history of trade and design. Richly illustrated texts explore the interrelationship of textiles, commerce, and taste from the age of discovery to the 19th century, including a detailed discussion of 120 illuminating works. From the elaborate dyed and painted cotton goods of India to the sumptuous silks of Japan, China, Turkey, and Iran, the paths of influence are traced westward to Europe and the Americas. Essential to this exchange was the trade in highly valued natural dyes and dye products, underscoring the influence of global exploration on the aesthetics and production techniques of textiles, and the resulting fashion for the "exotic."

    Catherine Legrand has spent more than twenty years traveling and researching the subject, and she has a deep knowledge of the ancient techniques, patterns, and clothing traditions that characterize ethnic textile design.The book explores the production of indigo textiles throughout America, China, India, Africa, Central Asia, Japan, Laos, and Vietnam. It features more than 500 color photographs and is completed by specially commissioned drawings that provide close-ups of patterns and cloths.

    One of the many creatures that commute on the Mississippi Flyway as part of an annual migration, they pass along Chicago’s lakefront and through midwestern backyards on a path used by their species for millennia. This magnificent migrational dance takes place every year in Chicagoland, yet it is often missed by the region’s two-legged residents. The Art of Migration uncovers these extraordinary patterns that play out over the seasons. Readers are introduced to over two hundred of the birds and insects that traverse regions from the edge of Lake Superior to Lake Michigan and to the rivers that flow into the Mississippi. As the only artist in residence at the Field Museum, Peggy Macnamara has a unique vantage point for studying these patterns and capturing their distinctive traits. Her magnificent watercolor illustrations capture flocks, movement, and species-specific details. The illustrations are accompanied by text from museum staff and include details such as natural histories, notable features for identification, behavior, and how species have adapted to environmental changes. The book follows a gentle seasonal sequence and includes chapters on studying migration, artist’s notes on illustrating wildlife, and tips on the best ways to watch for birds and insects in the Chicago area. A perfect balance of science and art, The Art of Migration will prompt us to marvel anew at the remarkable spectacle going on around us.

    DImperio tells each museums story, in light of its cultural and historical relevance, and he provides a wealth of information about the museums as places of interest to visit, not just to read about.

    history. Held at Manhattan’s 69th Regiment Armory in 1913, the show brought modernism to America in an unprecedented display of 1300 works by artists including Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp, A quarter of a million Americans visited the show; most couldn’t make sense of what they were seeing. Newspaper critics questioned the artists’ sanity. A popular rumor held that the real creator of one abstract canvas was a donkey with its tail dipped in paint.The Armory Show went on to Boston and Chicago and its effects spread across the country. American artists embraced a new spirit of experimentation as conservative art institutions lost all influence. New modern art galleries opened to serve collectors interested in buying the most progressive works. Over time, the stage was set for American revolutionaries such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. Today, when museums of modern and contemporary art dot the nation and New York reigns as art capital of the universe, we live in a world created by the Armory Show.Elizabeth Lunday, author of the breakout hit Secret Lives of Great Artists, tells the story of the exhibition from the perspectives of organizers, contributors, viewers, and critics. Brimming with fascinating and surprising details, the book takes a fast-paced tour of life in America and Europe, peering into Gertrude Stein’s famous Paris salon, sitting in at the fabulous parties of New York socialites, and elbowing through the crowds at the Armory itself.

    Thanks to the social advances of the civil rights movement and the rise of multiculturalism, African American artists in the late 1980s and early ’90s enjoyed unprecedented access to established institutions of publicity and display. Yet in this moment of ostensible freedom, black cultural practitioners found themselves turning to the history of slavery. Bound to Appear focuses on four of these artists—Renée Green, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, and Fred Wilson—who have dominated and shaped the field of American art over the past two decades through large-scale installations that radically departed from prior conventions for representing the enslaved. Huey Copeland shows that their projects draw on strategies associated with minimalism, conceptualism, and institutional critique to position the slave as a vexed figure—both subject and object, property and person. They also engage the visual logic of race in modernity and the challenges negotiated by black subjects in the present. As such, Copeland argues, their work reframes strategies of representation and rethinks how blackness might be imagined and felt long after the end of the “peculiar institution.” The first book to examine in depth these artists’ engagements with slavery, Bound to Appear will leave an indelible mark on modern and contemporary art.

    Illustrated with 70 color images of visually powerful historical and contemporary works, this book - which accompanies an exhibition of the same title opening in August 2013 at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York - reveals how Anishinaabe (also known in the United States as Ojibwe or Chippewa) artists have expressed the deeply rooted spiritual and social dimensions of their relations with the Great Lakes region.

    This truly handsome tome details, with full color photos and well-researched history, over 275 of the most important and valuable guns from the NRA National Firearms Museum in Fairfax, Virginia.With guns dating from the 1600s to the present day, the book includes over 1,000 color photographs from the museum's own collection. Gun collectors and enthusiasts will marvel at the history and intricate beauty of the world's most treasured firearms.Included in the collection are guns from King James II, Napoleon Bonaparte, Annie Oakley, President Theodore Roosevelt, President Grover Cleveland, Kaiser Wilhelm, Hermann Goring, John Wayne, Sammy Davis, Jr., General Douglas McArthur, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, President John F. Kennedy, to name but a few. In addition, peruse the extensive Robert E. Peterson collection's beautifully engraved guns, Gatling guns, and sporting guns.

    Featuring contributions from all the participants and a rich selection of illustrations, This Is Our Life details the remarkable story of the Haida Project – from the planning to the encounter and through the years that followed. A fascinating look at the meaning behind objects, the value of repatriation, and the impact of historical trajectories like colonialism, this is also a story of the understanding that grew between the Haida people and museum staff.

    Accompanying a major retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Art to honor Marville’s bicentennial, Charles Marville: Photographer of Nineteenth-Century Paris offers a survey of the artist’s entire career. This beautiful book, which begins with the city scenes and architectural studies Marville made throughout France and Germany in the 1850s, and also explores his landscapes and portraits, as well as his photographs of Paris both before and after many of its medieval streets were razed to make way for the broad boulevards, parks, and monumental buildings we have come to associate with the City of Light. Commissioned to record the city in transition, Marville became known as the official photographer of Paris.Marville has long been an enigma in the history of photography, in part because many of the documents about his life were thought to have been lost in a fire that destroyed Paris’s city hall in 1871. Based on meticulous research, this volume offers many new insights into Marville’s personal and professional biography, including the central fact that Marville was not his given name. Born Charles-François Bossu in 1813, the photographer adopted the pseudonym when he began his career as an illustrator in the 1830s. With five essays by respected scholars, this book offers the first comprehensive examination of Marville’s life and career and delivers the much-awaited public recognition his work so richly deserves.

    They discuss the key concepts underpinning our lived experience of objects and how museums can learn from them. Then they walk readers through concrete methods for transforming visitor-object experiences, including exercises and strategies for teams developing exhibit themes, messages, and content, and participatory experiences.

    Insightful essays informed by current debates in medical history, anthropology, museology and visual studies are complemented by astonishing images provided by both well-known and niche museums from around the world. With unparalleled coverage provided by curators, the 17 richly illustrated chapters explore collections from Aberdeen to Zurich including: Berlin (the Charité), Cleveland (the Dittrick), Copenhagen (the Medical Museion), Edinburgh (Surgeons’ Hall), Florence (La Specola), Leiden, London (the Hunterian Museum, the Science Museum, and Wellcome Collection), Philadelphia (the Mütter), Stockholm (the Karolinska Institute), Washington DC (the National Museum of Health and Medicine and the Smithsonian).

    Many of these institutions trace their roots to the 1960s and 1970s, when the struggle for racial equality inspired a movement within the black community to make the history and culture of African America more "public." This book tells the story of four of these groundbreaking museums: the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago (founded in 1961); the International Afro-American Museum in Detroit (1965); the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in Washington, D.C. (1967); and the African American Museum of Philadelphia (1976). Andrea A. Burns shows how the founders of these institutions, many of whom had ties to the Black Power movement, sought to provide African Americans with a meaningful alternative to the misrepresentation or utter neglect of black history found in standard textbooks and most public history sites. Through the recovery and interpretation of artifacts, documents, and stories drawn from African American experience, they encouraged the embrace of a distinctly black identity and promoted new methods of interaction between the museum and the local community.Over time, the black museum movement induced mainstream institutions to integrate African American history and culture into their own exhibits and educational programs. This often controversial process has culminated in the creation of a National Museum of African American History and Culture, now scheduled to open in the nation's capital in 2015.

    A large selection of pre-Columbian treasures, along with masterpieces dating from the colonial era and striking modern paintings and sculptures produced during the first half of the 20th century, offer new perspectives on the rich cultural identity of the country. In this richly illustrated reference, more than 20 international contributors explore the mythologies and rituals of ancient Andean civilizations; their perpetuation, concealment, or hybridization with Catholicism during the 18th and 19th centuries; and the rediscovery and valorization of Peruvian popular traditions and faiths in the 20th century.

    In The Wages of History, Amy Tyson enters the world of the public history interpreters at Minnesota's Historic Fort Snelling to investigate how they understand their roles and experience their daily work. Drawing on archival research, personal interviews, and participant observation, she reframes the current discourse on history museums by analyzing interpreters as laborers within the larger service and knowledge economies.Although many who are drawn to such work initially see it as a privilege -- an opportunity to connect with the public in meaningful ways through the medium of history -- the realities of the job almost inevitably alter that view. Not only do interpreters make considerable sacrifices, both emotional and financial, in order to pursue their work, but their sense of special status can lead them to avoid confronting troubling conditions on the job, at times fueling tensions in the workplace.This case study also offers insights -- many drawn from the author's seven years of working as an interpreter at Fort Snelling -- into the way gendered roles and behaviors from the past play out among the workers, the importance of creative autonomy to historical interpreters, and the ways those on public history's front lines both resist and embrace the site's more difficult and painful histories relating to slavery and American Indian genocide.

    This book of essays about his life and achievements grew out of a symposium sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art and by Columbia University. The symposium was held in 1981 simultaneously at The Cloisters and Columbia University in conjunction with an exhibition at The Cloisters that commemorated the 900th anniversary of Suger's birth. For the symposium, twenty-three medieval scholars from all parts of the world, representing a wide range of humanistic disciplines, were brought together to discuss the varied nature of Suger's activities. Suger has been best known for his contributions as a patron of art and architecture. As H. W. Janson wrote, "The origin of no previous style can be pinpointed as exactly as that of Gothic. It was born between 1137 and 1144 in the rebuilding, by Abbot Suger, of the Royal Abbey Church of Saint-Denis, just outside the city of Paris." Within decades of its "invention," the style spread throughout the Capetian domains and by the thirteenth century to all of Europe where it dominated architecture for the next two to three hundred years. Perhaps because Suger's achievements in art and architecture were so extraordinary, they have eclipsed the public's awareness of his crucial role in the growth of the Capetian monarchy and in other aspects of his participation in twelfth-century affairs. As royal adviser, Suger illustrates that superb collaboration between church and state so fundamental to an understanding of the development of the national states of Western Europe. As the essays in this volume devoted to Suger's political activities and historical writings demonstrate, he was, in addition to being a brilliantly innovative patron of architecture, an important architect of the French state. Only by bringing together differing humanistic perspectives on Suger and Saint-Denis has it been possible to achieve, for the first time, a fully rounded appreciation of a man who was, at the same time, a patron of the arts and literature, a politician who adroitly used his ecclesiastical position to enhance the growth and power of the monarchy, and a churchman consistently devoted to the promotion of the cult of Saint-Denis, the patron saint of his abbey and of France. [This book was originally published in 1986 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]