Smithsonian

Georgia O’Keeffe grooms her two large fluffs at home in New Mexico. 

An artist has used our @hirshhorn‘s distinctive circular shape to create this colorful, 360-degree mural.  

Swiss artist Nicolas Party’s “sunrise, sunset” stretches around nearly 400 feet of one of the museum’s curved galleries. Each section has its own vibrant, colorful vignette of the sun rising and setting—the inevitable, daily mark of time that connects that past and the future of humanity.

See the site-specific work through Oct. 1. After that, the museum will paint over Party’s work to make way for the next exhibition, and it will become part of another inevitable cycle of beginnings and endings that govern the space around us.

Balloon weddings were once all the rage. When flight was a novelty in the 19th century, these “destination weddings” became quite the spectacle.

The Sept. 27, 1888 wedding of Margaret Buckley and Edward T. Davis drew an estimated 40,000 people, who watched as the couple took to the air after their ceremony at the Rhode Island State Fair.

Their honeymoon-by-sky hit a snag, though, when the balloon landed in a swamp that evening. The passengers had to cling to the ropes above the basket to stay out of the water—and decided to finish the trip by train.

Later, the couple reenacted their wedding for a photographer in a studio, which is how we have this photo in our National Air and Space Museum.

Not only does it stink, but part of this orchid resembles wriggling maggots. A great gift! 

This specimen of Bulbophyllum phalaenopsis, charmingly nicknamed “Bucky,” once nearly shut down a @smithsoniangardens greenhouse for DAYS because of its stench. 

When it was first donated to us, few people outside Asia had seen the species, though it is recorded in early writings as smelling like “a thousand dead elephants rotting in the sun.” 

Look who we found at the beach this weekend.

When Tim Jerman was a child, he couldn’t decide whether to become a marine biologist or an artist. So he became an artist who created intricate glass sculptures of aquatic life.

For more than 100 years, no one knew how Smithsonian scientist Robert Kennicott died. 

He started as part of a rowdy band of scientists who lived in the Smithsonian Castle and named themselves the megatherium club after an extinct giant sloth. When their work was done for the day, they took to drinking, having sack races down the hallways and serenading the boss’s daughters. 

To start the new season of our podcast Sidedoor, we trace Kennicott’s life and uncover the mystery of his death with our modern bone detectives. 

We hope your weeked rocks.

A rock concert inspired artist Debra Baxter to create her “Devil Horns Crystal Brass Knuckles” series. This one, a lefty, is on view at our @americanartmuseum’s #RenwickGallery, which is home to the museum’s collection of contemporary craft and decorative art.

It’s wedding season (but you knew that). This gown was made from a nylon parachute that saved Maj. Claude Hensinger during World War II.

The pilot was returning from a raid over Japan in August 1944 when his engine caught fire. When he proposed to his girlfriend Ruth after the war, he offered her the material from the parachute that saved his life.

She worked with a seamstress to create the bodice, and used the strings on the parachute to shorten the front of the dress and create a train in the back.

The couple married July 19, 1947, and the dress was later donated to our National Museum of American History.

National Doughnut Day goals. 🍩👑

This pastry princess—check out that crown!—is from the Sally L. Steinberg Collection of Doughnut Ephemera in our National Museum of American History's Archives Center. (Steinberg also considered herself a doughnut princess, as her grandfather Adolph Levitt was America's original "doughnut king,” having developed the automatic doughnut making machine and founded the modern American doughnut industry.)

Carrot top of the morning to you. 

In the Victorian era, whimsical seed cards like this one were all the rage, inspiring people to buy seeds and collect the cards that came with them. 

Along with being collectors’ items, seed and nursery cards document the history of U.S. agricultural business and advertising. They tell a story about how American gardening has been shaped by history, social attitudes, the environment and innovation. 

What story do you think this gentleman would tell? 

These human towers stretch back to the early 1800s and as high as nine levels of people.

Monday feels: Mary Jane the baby sloth, born at our National Zoo in 1964.

Zoo staff, who hand-reared Mary Jane, named the two-toed sloth long before it was determined that the baby was a male. He’s seen snuggling at 9 months old in this Smithsonian Institution Archives photo.

When is a photograph more than a picture?

These stunning images are a preview of the first special exhibition at our @nmaahc​, which explores the stories behind more than 150 photographs and related objects from their collection.

The images, by established and emerging photographers from the 19th century to the present, show a range of American experiences. They challenge you to look beyond the surface to consider their significance in history, their cultural meaning, and your own perspective.

Happy Cinco de Mayo! (It’s not Mexico’s Independence Day.)

Cinco de Mayo actually celebrates the Mexican victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla May 5, 1862.

This portrait from our collection is of Mexican President Benito Juarez. After reclaiming the presidency post-French invasion, he declared that May 5—the anniversary of the Battle of Puebla—would be a national holiday.

The first Cinco de Mayo celebrations didn’t include margaritas, because they weren’t invented until the 1940s. By the 1970s, the margarita surpassed the martini as the most popular American cocktail.

Cats didn’t need the internet to achieve feline fame. 

Our @archivesofamericanart has a new exhibition, “Before Internet Cats: Feline Finds from the Archives of American Art,” which explores how cats are represented in rare documents like sketches and drawings, letters, and photographs from the 19th century through the early 2000s.

We decided to let the cat out of the bag...er, box with this collage postcard sent from fiber artist Lenore Tawney to filmmaker Maryette Charlton. Tawney’s postcards often featured intricate layers of found media and handwritten notes. Animals, especially cats, were a frequent motif.

While we think the whole exhibition is purrfect (we couldn’t help it), here are some of our favorite pieces from the archives:

Georges Mathieu, a French painter, embellished this oversize letter to painter Hedda Sterne. It’s among the cat-themed correspondence from Mathieu that are in Sterne’s papers.

Cats often make ideal studio companions. They serve as sympathetic critics and elegant muses. 

In this photo, Pozy the cat watches muralist Edna Reindel work in her California studio. (Pozy is also the subject of the wall mural behind them.)

Photos of artists in their studios enhance our understanding of their stories and their working processes.

Reginald Gammon was known for his evocative portraits of prominent African Americans (and not cats) but in the mid-1960s he illustrated a children’s book that chronicles the friendship between a boy and a bespectacled cat.

Thousands of sketches in the Archives of American Art offer insight into artists’ creative processes. A 1948 sketchbook of watercolor studies by muralist and children’s book illustrator Emily Barto highlights the distinct personalities of several felines—here’s one taking a cat nap.

The “First Lady of Song,” Ella Fitzgerald, was born 100 years ago today.

We’re celebrating the centennial of her birth and the legendary career that followed with this portrait on view at our National Portrait Gallery. Dizzy Gillespie, on the right, is all of us as he gazes at Lady Ella in song.

The photographer, William P. Gottlieb, learned to use a camera so that he could include images in his weekly music column for The Washington Post. Today, his photos of jazz musicians from the 1930s and ’40s are regarded as invaluable visual records of jazz’s Golden Age. 

Read more about Fitzgerald’s rise to fame and this portrait, a recent museum acquisition which has never been shown before.

“On this Earth Day, ‘Earth Optimism’ should be more than a slogan; it should be a rallying cry for people of conscience to work together year-round in order to safeguard this beautiful planet we call home.”

— Smithsonian Secretary David J. Skorton

This weekend, we’re sharing conservation success stories at our #EarthOptimism Summit, a first-of-its-kind gathering of more than 150 scientists, thought leaders, philanthropists and civic leaders to share and learn from each other’s conservation achievements.