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The Blind Leading the Blind (1947-49) by Louise Bourgeois. Image Courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum.

Friday, February 27: Friday Gallery Talk: Louise Bourgeois

An afternoon at the art gallery? How bourgeois! Louise Bourgeois to be exact. She’s the artist responsible for the big honkin’ spider living outside the Hirshhorn’s entryway and the focus of a recently-opened exhibition of her work. She is also the subject of today’s gallery talk, headed by local artist Cara Ober. Free.Hirshhorn, 12:30 PM.

Saturday, February 28: Kirikou and the Sorceress

Come enjoy this animated feature based on an African folk tale about a little boy who saves his village from an evil sorceress. In French with English subtitles. Free. National Museum of African Art, 1 PM.

Sunday, March 1: Art a la Cart

If you’re between the ages 7 and 12, come out to the American Art Museum (with your parents, of course) for some hands-on fun that will allow you to explore the world of art on a whole new level. Interactive carts are scattered throughout the gallery—see if you can find them and then expand your understanding and appreciation of fine art. Free. Repeats the first Sunday of every month. American Art Museum, 1-3 PM.

For a complete listing of Smithsonian exhibits and events, be sure to visit www.goSmithsonian.com and check out the easy-to-use calendar.

Doug Owsley is the Smithsonian’s bone detective. Doug can read a human skeleton, like you can read this post. He’s a forensic anthropologist and for the last two decades, Doug along with his assistant Kari Bruwelheide, has been called in to help with some of the country’s most notorious crime scenes and tragedies—Branch Davidians, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Pentagon after 9/11.

And just as a host of new forensic tools, DNA analysis, the electron microscope have enhanced crime scene investigations, so has it furthered the study and analysis at prehistoric and historic dig sites. At Jamestown, VA, and St. Mary’s City, Md, Doug and Kari have been working a with a team of forensic investigators to uncover the lost stories of the men and women who settled in these early colonial outposts. The new exhibition, “Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th Century Chesapeake,” is an eye into scientific discovery and the history it has revealed. Meet Doug as he takes us on a tour of the exhibition above and check out our feature, too.

Courtesy of Smithsonian Archives

I look at this photograph and I immediately start reminiscing about many a fun-filled afternoon playing Hungry Hungry Hippos, bopping the backsides of plastic technicolor hippopotami in an attempt to eat more white plastic marbles than my opponents. I can totally see the guy on the left going, “Hey, what’re all these marbles doing in here?”

Or can’t you just imagine these guys standing around—perhaps a little sloshed—singing, “Oh I want a hippopotamus for Christmas. Only a hippopotamus will do!”

Or, “Didn’t I see you in Fantasia?”

But there again, my ideas may be coming from FAR left field.

What words come to mind when you see this image? Create captions of your very own in the comments area below to enter in our second caption writing contest. Our first was a wild success.

Be creative! You have until noon on Wednesday, March 4 to send in your ideas.

The winner—and the original caption information for the image—will be announced here on the blog later that afternoon.

A photo of 2004's Folklife Festival

How fortunate that on a bitter, blustery winter’s day, I’m tasked with writing about something warm. Warmth, heat, hot —like the summertime heat that befalls Washington, DC, every year in the last week of June and the first week of July.

Those ten days, coinciding incidentally with the Smithsonian’s annual Folklife Festival tradition, are arguably the hottest days of summer. And every year, diligent fan of the festival that I am, I find a comfortable sun dress, cover my head from the sun, and drag myself over to the National Mall to take in the cultural salad bar of artisans, musicians, storytellers, chefs and assorted purveyors of lost or fading traditions. I take in the peculiar ululations of song carried over from a distant spot on the globe, it’s unfamiliar rhythms and sounds test my comfort zone, and make me feel, well, . . uncomfortable. But never mind.

Over the years, I’ve watched cowboys rope cattle, tasted spicy fare from along Asia’s silk road, tried to play a tune an African banjo called a ngoni, danced to Texas swing and swayed to a lusty Scottish ballad, and even once watched the Wisconsin marching band perform the UW fight song (go Badgers!)

It’s a lot of fun, if you can ignore the pools of sweat that gather at the small of your back. So anyway, I told you all that to tell you this. Save the Date!

This year’s festival will be June 24 to June 28 and will reopen from July 1 to July 5.

Its featured exhibitions are:

“Giving Voice: The Power of Words in African American Culture” : exploring the power of African American oral traditions and how they shaped the culture.

“Las Américas: Un Mundo Musical/The Americas: A Musical World” : Bomba, jíbaro, mariachi, vallenato and other musical styles from the Americas.

And, “Wales Smithsonian Cymru” : Cymru is the Welsh word for Wales, the United Kingdom’s three million strong, bilingual principality, located in the south east of the British Isles.

(Photograph courtesy of Jeff Tinsley, 2004)

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Sirens echoed through a room in the Hirshhorn Museum during an artist lecture by Ori Gersht last week. The people around me remained silent, busy focusing on the still life image of flowers being projected onto the screen in front of us. They could ignore the warning, but I knew what was coming. I bowed my head, closed my eyes and waited.

A moment later, the floral arrangement blew up and a chorus of gasps and rattling seats replaced the sirens. The image on the screen was now a disaster area, as fragments of petals and stems fluttered in slow motion toward the Earth. Gersht calls this piece, Big Bang I.

For Gersht, an Israeli-born artist who now lives and works in London, his opus is all about extremes – an exploration of how two opposite ideas can cancel each other out. For example, in Pomegranate (see video above), he takes Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, a 1602 still life painting by Spanish monk Juan Cotán, and pits it against the 1964 photograph of a bullet piercing an apple by late MIT professor Harold “Doc” Edgerton. In the end, the pomegranate loses.

“It’s all about pulling tension between the old masters and new technologies,” Gersht said during his talk. “We see a simultaneous moment of destruction and togetherness coincide.”

So I began to get nervous when the image of a duck, hanging lifeless by its webbed foot, appeared on the projector screen. Fortunately, in Falling Bird, the dead duck is merely dropped into water as an orange sits in the background. I watched as the duck was seemingly consumed by its reflection in the pool.

In the March issue of Smithsonian, I asked Gersht whether his work was a commentary on the violence we see in the world around us, especially given his Israeli heritage. He called the link between his identity and work inevitable, adding:

“My work is not so much a direct commentary as it is an open-ended observation of the absurdities around us,” he said. “I’m thinking about scenarios where, in one place, there is a very bloody war, while in another place people are living a comfortable, decadent lifestyle. I’m intrigued by that kind of parallel existence, and how one sometimes weaves into the other.”

Gersht’s work will be on view at the at the Hirshhorn Museum’s Black Box Theater through April 12, 2009.

Blowout at Mardi Gras, courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways

In honor of today’s Mardi Gras festivities happening down in New Orleans, we thought we’d treat our cabin ever with a little bit of Louisiana jazz and zydeco courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways.

There is Blowout at Mardi Gras, a collection of Dixieland jazz recorded in 1955 featuring clarinetist Sid Davilla, trombonist Waldren “Frog” Joseph, trumpeter Thomas Jefferson and pianists Quentin Batiste and Red Camp, among other.

Another older selection that may get you in the mood is Clambake on Bourbon Street, a recording of more New Orleans jazz, this time with some Satchmo-inspired tunes from Sam DeKemel.

But lastly, on a tip from our friends over at Folkways, is a new release from the talented Michael Doucet, the acclaimed cajun/zydeco musician. The album was nominated for a Grammy this year, but he lost to none other than himself, as part of his band BeauSoleil.

Don’t let your Fat Tuesday go by without a little merriment; just don’t go too crazy with the beads or your bosses will start wondering what’s going on.

David Rockwell, photo by Todd Plitt

Last night after the red-carpet coverage, a segment on New York architect David Rockwell caught my attention. I know that guy, I thought; he won a design award last year from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

Rockwell designed the newly revamped and stunningly svelte stage set across which the equally svelte Hugh Jackman sang, danced and charmed his worldwide audience.

Rockwell told newspapers that he was going for a “nightclub” effect for the show. The theater’s typically red hues shifted to cool blues for the night. A curtain made of 92,000 dangling Swarovski crystals framed the stage. At times, the band was onstage. And the web-like pattern on the stage floor mimicked that in Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome.

Rockwell’s firm has designed restaurants, Broadway sets (“Hairspray” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”), the Jet Blue terminal at JFK, and city playgrounds.

Rockwell is all about playful reinvention. In fact, he had a leg up on the job going in; he knew the Kodak Theater’s ins and outs because he designed it to begin with. Here are a few snippets from an interview I had with him at the time he won the Cooper-Hewitt’s award.

There’s such variety in your work. What do you look for in a project?

The thing that is most interesting to us is doing things where we don’t know the answer before we begin. What I look for is a client who is curious and a chance to invent. A common thread through our work is trying to find ways to create surprise and delight through design.

Necco Wafers and a Lite-Brite helped inspire your set design for “Hairspray.” Do you surround yourself with toys as you work?

I do. Our office is a big, habitable collage or playpen. One thing I collect is kaleidoscopes. They are interesting examples of taking things we’re familiar with in the world and reframing those in a new and interesting way, jumbling up things to get a new view on them.

It’s been said that you put people at the forefront of your work, often interviewing those who will be using the space to help inform your design.

One of our basic building blocks is people and looking at spaces from their point of view, how they move through it, how a space unfolds. So we start by creating a kind of narrative. I think so much of my inspiration in design is from the world of theater. I love theater, and I grew up in a family where my mom was involved in theater. If I’m working on a play, the script is the map. When we’re creating a building or space, we have to extract that script from the clients we’re working with. Our interviewing is really about finding that hidden DNA, those special elements about the client, the site, the location to build the story around.

Mercury Capstule Phone Booth (left) will be discussed at the Udvar Hazy Center. But is it cooler than the R2-D2 mailbox? Let's discuss. Image courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum.

Monday, February 23: Featherwork Workshop

You know what your spring wardrobe needs? Feathers, and lots of ‘em! Learn how to make a war bonnet of your very own under the tutelage of Dennis Zotigh. Free, but reservations required. Call 202-633-6644, or email NMAI-GroupReservations@si.edu to reserve your spot today. National Museum of the American Indian, 10:30 AM.

Tuesday, February 24: Reruns

Yesterday’s Featherwork Workshop repeats today. Aside from that, we got nothing new.

Wednesday, February 25: Black Orpheus

A modern retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice set to a bossa nova beat. Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus went on to nab both a Golden Globe and an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1959. (On a side note, President Barack Obama cites it as his mother’s favorite movie in his memoir Dreams From My Father. You can get in on the discussion of this film—and the issues it raises—at Film Blog.) Free. Anacostia Museum, 11 AM and 7 PM.

Thursday, February 26: The Mercury Capsule Phone Booth

It’s hard not to question the aesthetic sensibilities of the 1960s, which is partially why that decade is so much fun to examine. Take, for instance, this novelty phone booth in the shape of the Mercury space capsule. What can one say about this marvelous piece of space-age kitsch? Personally, I’m speechless; however, Air and Space Museum expert Margaret Weitekamp will be on hand to talk about this beautifully bizarre homage to the United States’ advancements in space exploration. Free. National Air and Space Museum Udvar Hazy Center, 12:30 PM.

Friday, February 27: Friday Gallery Talk: Louise Bourgeois

An afternoon at the art gallery? How bourgeois! Louise Bourgeois to be exact. She’s the artist responsible for the big honkin’ spider living outside the Hirshhorn’s entryway and the focus of a recently-opened exhibition of her work. She is also the subject of today’s gallery talk, headed by local artist Cara Ober. Free. Hirshhorn, 12:30 PM.

For a complete listing of Smithsonian exhibits and events, be sure to visit www.goSmithsonian.com and check out the easy-to-use calendar.