Smithsonian.com

What if we could make masks to look like these models in the Natural History Museum's Hall of Human Origins? Artist: John Gurche. Photo by Chip Clark, NMNH.

In past years, our ATM team of bloggers has collectively pored over the Smithsonian’s collections to bring you museum-inspired costume ideas. Last year was a banner year for us, as we ginned up ideas for dressing as Carol Burnett in her curtain rod dress, from when she spoofed Gone With the Wind on her comedy show, and Abel the Monkey, who paved the way for human space flight. For a group costume, we went conceptual, suggesting you and six friends each wear a white t-shirt inscribed with one of the seven words in artist Lawrence Weiner’s “A RUBBER BALL THROWN ON THE SEA,” on display at the Hirshhorn.

This year, however, I decided to turn to the Institution’s resident experts—curators at the museums—for their insider’s insight. Here is what they suggest:

1. Man Ray’s Nut Girls

Melissa Ho, assistant curator at the Hirshhorn Museum, has had collage on the brain, as she has been busily working on an upcoming show of collage and assemblage works called “Over, Under, Next.” She suggests cobbling together a costume inspired by Man Ray’s 1941 photograph and mixed media collage, Nut Girls. In it, the American artist puts a walnut, in place of a head, on a cutout of one woman, and on another figure, the walnut covers the woman’s head and torso. “Carve a big walnut out of Styrofoam and slip on a romper,” says Ho.

Another idea for a costume party, she says, is to dress as Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely’s The Sorceress (1961). “This is one of his motorized kinetic sculptures,” says Ho. “When turned on, it shakes and vibrates until its bits and pieces start to fall off—so perfect outfit for dancing!”

2. Dracula

According to Thomas Lera, the Winton M. Blout Chair in Research at the National Postal Museum, Dracula is the Halloween character that postal administrations around the world have depicted the most on stamps. In 1997, the U.S. Postal Service issued a “Classic Movie Monsters” stamp set, featuring five villains from Universal Studio films. Dracula was one. “As a special security feature, a process called ‘scrambled indicia’ was used, which overlaps symbols and images that are not seen by the naked eye when printed,” says Lera. “The Dracula stamp has three vampire bats in the blue background, which can only be seen by a precision optical device using elongated lenses called lenticules.” Lera suggests modeling a Dracula costume after this or the many other portrayals—a Canadian stamp honoring the 100th anniversary of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula in 1997, a Samoan stamp from 2000 featuring the Sesame Street’s Count von Count and a British stamp from 2008 with actor Christopher Lee as Dracula commemorating the 50th anniversary of Hammer Horror Films.

3. Dr. John Jeffries

Seeking input from Smithsonian curators certainly brought some little-known characters to light. When I asked Tom Crouch, senior curator of aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum, who or what he might be inspired to dress up as for Halloween, he was quick to answer Dr. John Jeffries. Who, you might ask? Jeffries is not exactly a household name, but his story may be an interesting one to tell at a party. On January 7, 1785, Jeffries flew the English Channel in a balloon with Pierre Blanchard, making him the first American to make a free flight. “He wore a great costume, which included a leopard skin hat to keep his head warm, a cork jacket to keep him afloat in case of a channel landing and a Jerry Seinfeld style ‘puffy shirt,’ complete with frilled cuffs, so that, I suppose, he would look good in the post-flight interviews,” says Crouch. NASM has the large barometer and thermometer that Jeffries carried with him in its collection. As it would have it, some pieces of the outfit are at Harvard’s Houghton Library, where his papers are kept. “Fortunately, some years ago my friend and Smithsonian curator of costume, Claudia Kidwell, studied the Jeffries garments and prepared patterns for them, so sewing up my costume would not be all that difficult,” says Crouch. Over three decades, Crouch has researched the life of Jeffries. “I could step right into the good doctor’s shoes and answer any questions that might arise,” he says.

4. Empress Dowager Cixi

Although he does not think he would make a convincing Empress Dowager, David Hogge, head of the archives at the Freer and Sackler galleries, offers it up as a suggestion to others. Empress Cixi reigned as sovereign of China for 45 years in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Nineteen portraits of her are currently on display in the exhibition “Power | Play: China’s Empress Dowager,” which Hogge curated, at the Arther M. Sackler Gallery, if you are in need of some inspiration. Empress Cixi wore her fingernails about an inch long, and on her third and pinky fingers, notes Hogge, she wore elaborate jeweled, gold filigreed fingernail protectors. “Those seem to give people the creeps,” says Hogge.

5. An Early Human

Rick Potts, curator of anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, is a self-described Halloween fanatic. “What could be better than to skulk around the neighborhood or delight party-goers on Halloween night by dressing up as a realistic early human?” he says. “I wish I could turn some of the amazing visages in our Hall of Human Origins into masks.”

6. Annie Oakley

In 2007, the National Portrait Gallery purchased a photograph at an auction of sharpshooter Annie Oakley taken in 1885. “She was a cowgirl, known as “little sure shot” for her extraordinary ability to hit a moving target, most famously a small coin, even on horseback, all while maintaining ‘lady-like’ composure and elegance,” says Anne Collins Goodyear, associate curator of prints and drawings at the museum. “Wonderful inspiration for the imagination!” In the photograph, Oakley holds a rifle and is wearing a hat, blouse and fringed skirt with embroidered flowers.

7. Bob Dylan

Gail Davidson, head of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s department of drawings, prints and graphic design, considers Milton Glaser’s famous 1966 poster of singer Bob Dylan great costume fodder. Glaser, an artist and graphic designer, created the poster early in his career, to be included in the packaging of Dylan’s “Greatest Hits” LP. In terms of the poster’s composition, Glaser was influenced by a 1957 self-portrait by Marcel Duchamp. But, he gave it a psychedelic feel by adding bold colors to Dylan’s tousled hair. “I would dress up by dying my hair in wavelets of the different colors in the poster,” says Davidson.

8. A Zoo Animal…Take Your Pick

Cute baby animals born at the National Zoo are our bread and butter here at the ATM blog. But Craig Saffoe, the Zoo’s curator of Great Cats and Andean Bears, reminds us, “What’s cuter than an infant dressed as a full-maned lion?” Animals make fine costumes for adults too. Dressing as an endangered species gives one the opportunity to have an awesome costume and educate friends, notes Saffoe. There is also great potential for themed family costumes. “A mother and her infant could dress as a kangaroo and her joey, a banana and a monkey or a eucalyptus tree and a koala bear. A family could dress as a pride of lions, a gaggle of geese or a flock of flamingos. Whatever animal costume you choose, don’t forget you’ll need a zookeeper!” says the curator, whose son attended this year’s Boo at the Zoo event at the National Zoo in a zookeeper uniform.

Parque de los Niños, a redeveloped space in Medellín, Colombia. Photo by Diana Moreno

For decades, in Medellín, Columbia, the difference between rich and poor areas has been a virtual tale of two cities. “The formal city grew in the valley, and the informal settlement on the hills around. It was the most violent city in the world” says Cynthia E. Smith, a curator of socially responsible design at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in New York City.

Then, the city embarked on a large-scale project to tie the two areas together, building a cable mass transit system up the hillsides and surrounding the stations with parks. “The mayor said ‘I want to build the most beautiful buildings in the poorest parts of the city,’ and so he built worldclass libraries and business centers next to the parks,” Smith says. Over time, violence in the outlying areas of the cities dropped sharply and land values rose.

Medellín is one of dozens of success stories, large and small, that fill the newly opened “Design with the Other 90%: Cities” exhibition at the United Nations Building in New York. On Manhattan’s East Side, among skyscrapers and luxury hotels in one of the wealthiest cities on the planet, the exhibition showcases how the world’s most destitute countries have solved integral problems of housing, health care, infrastructure and the environment. Through multimedia, scale models, maps and prototypes, the show illustrates to visitors the worries of daily life in the squatter communities of countries like India, Uganda and Mexico—as well as the potential for design to provide solutions.

In recent years, urbanization and population growth in developing countries have caused countless problems in cities across Asia, Africa and South America to escalate. “Close to one billion people live in informal settlements, more commonly known as slums or squatter communities, and that’s projected to grow to two billion over the next 20 years,” Smith says. “Many municipalities and regional governments can’t keep up with this rapid growth, and so there’s an exchange that’s taking place between the informal communities and designers, architects, urban planners and engineers.”

“The show is specifically design ‘with,’” she says. “It’s really about working in partnership with people in the informal settlements, exchanging design information so that they can build their own, better housing.”

The show features 60 novel design approaches that have been applied to problems as varied as transferring money to relatives (using a mobile phone based system) and charging devices without an electrical grid (running a bicycle wheel to create an electrical current).

UNICEF's Digital Drum, which provides information and internet access in Uganda. Photo: © UNICEF Uganda/Jean-Marc Lefébure

They also range from the ingeniously obvious to the remarkably intricate. In Bangladesh, arsenic is the most common toxin in drinking water, and in severe cases can cause death. Abul Hussam, a chemist at George Mason University designed the SONO Water Filter to address this problem as simply and inexpensively as possible. “It’s a sand and composite iron matrix, and wood charcoal, and brick chips,” says Smith. “You just pour in the water, and it filters through, and you end up without toxins.”

In Uganda, meanwhile, researchers found an information gap: only 3 percent of Ugandan adults typically use the internet, compared to 15 percent in neighboring Kenya. A UNICEF team created the Digital Drum, a freestanding solar-powered computing hub. “They work locally with car mechanics to build them,” Smith says, using discarded oil drums to enclose rugged computers equipped with basic software. “They provide some very basic information about rights and safety, health, education, and there are games on here that the kids can play to teach them about math.”

In designing the exhibition, which updates the original 2007 Cooper-Hewitt “Design with the Other 90%” show, Smith traveled the world and consulted with an international panel to select the range of projects shown. Along with the exhibition and the website, Smith says, “We have a new ‘Design with the Other 90%’ network, which is a social network linked to the website, where designers can upload their own projects.”

Along with the show’s backers, which include the UN Academic Impact Initiative, Smith hopes to use this network—and the exhibition’s placement at the UN—to spark further innovation and collaboration among the international design community. “Because this growth is happening so quickly, you can look at it as one billion problems, or one billion solutions,” she says.

Wandering the rows of innovations on display, ones sees that the point of “Design with the Other 90%” is not that solutions are immediate or easy. It’s made clear, through graphics and data, that the developing world’s problems are growing exponentially. But the exhibition is uplifting; despite seemingly daunting circumstances, design can put relief within reach—and the movement to employ it in slums and squatter communities is growing.

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s “Design with the Other 90%: Cities” is on display at the UN Building in New York City through January 9, 2012.

Alice Waters, by Dave Woody; 2010; National Portrait Gallery; Commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery as part of the First Prize, Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009.

The National Portrait Gallery has hosted two installments of its Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Simply put, artists submit one portrait. The artist must create it from an in-person encounter with his or subject, as opposed to from a photograph, and a jury of curators, artists and professors reviews the entries. The finalists’ portraits are exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, and three top winners receive cash prizes. The grand prize winner is awarded $25,000 and may be commissioned to portray a famous, living American in a portrait for the museum’s collection.

The winner of the first, David Lenz, painted a portrait of Eunice Kennedy Shriver for the museum’s collection, and Dave Woody, grand prize winner of the second contest, captured restaurateur Alice Waters in a photographic portrait, to be installed at the National Portrait Gallery in late January. Now, the museum is in search of the next top portraitist. The museum is accepting submissions through November 30. (The original call for entries through October 31 was extended.)

“I look for interesting approaches to the idea of a portrait, for a work of art that has a strong impact on me, and for evidence that the artist has mastered his or her craft, whether that is painting, photography, time-based media, etc.,” says Brandon Fortune, a curator of painting and sculpture at the National Portrait Gallery and a juror in the competition. The museum is interested in seeing how portraiture is being redefined in the contemporary art scene, and jurors have been impressed by the ways that past entrants have pushed boundaries. “We have seen videos with no images—only words—and paintings with no visible face. We’ve also seen artists who are finding subjects everywhere around them. Contemporary portraits no longer focus on elite subjects.”

Fortune encourages artists to take a chance. “In 2009, the second place winner, Stanley Rayfield, was a newly minted art school graduate. The jury didn’t know that—and they were very moved by the strength of his portrait of his father,” she says.

Virginia Outwin Boochever, a former docent at the National Portrait Gallery, endowed the competition to support artists who were exploring the realm of portraiture. Boochever studied art at the graduate level and was an avid collector herself. She knew about an annual competition held at London’s National Portrait Gallery and wanted the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery to host a similar contest.

The grand prize winner of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition has the opportunity to create a portrait of a famous American. “We work with the artist to see what areas of contemporary life and endeavor are important to them,” says Fortune. “Then, consulting with our staff historians, we draw up a list of possible candidates, whose portraits would be significant additions to our permanent collection. Our advisory board votes on the subject.” And, with that commissioned portrait, the museum expands its collection, further exploring American history through portraits and visual biography. From my perspective, it seems to be a win-win for both parties involved.

For more information, read the contest rules. Entries will be accepted electronically through November 30.

Lord's autograph quilt. Photo courtesy American History Museum

As part of the ongoing 150th anniversary of the Civil War at the Smithsonian Institution, the Around the Mall team will be reporting in a series of posts on some of the illustrative artifacts held by the museums from that epic battle. See more from the collections here.

In 1860, with South Carolina threatening to secede and the nation on the brink of civil war, a Nashville teenager named Mary Hughes Lord started making a quilt.

She wrote, “the day Tenn. seceded I stitched the U.S. Flag in the center of the quilt, my father being a loyal man.” As war raged across the country, she carried the quilt across rebel lines and had it signed by scores of generals, statesmen and presidents, totaling 101 autographs in the end.

Soon, the quilt itself became a symbol of solidarity for the Union. “This quilt was saluted by 20,000 troops at the funeral of Pres. Lincoln,” she wrote. “[It] hung over the East door of the rotunda when Pres Garfield’s body lay in State, [and] has been hung out at different Inaugurations.”

At the time, filling a quilt with the autographs of famous figures was not a typical idea. “There were lots of signature quilts, but they were not quite like this one. Frequently they were in blocks, and a person would do a block, so that would be the equivalent of a page in an album,” says Doris Bowman, curator of textiles at the museum. “A lot of people were writing on quilts at the time, but this one was a bit different.”

Lord wrote that she got the idea following a particularly bloody battle in Tennessee. “After the battle of Stone River, Gen’l Rosencrans suggested I make an autograph quilt of it,” Lord wrote. “At his headquaters [sic] his was the first name placed on the flag.” For several years, she traveled the country and covered the quilt with signatures, assigning lesser figures spots on the borders and hexagons and reserving the center flag for men such as Lincoln, James A. Garfield and Ulysses S. Grant.

Detail view of the quilt's center flag, featuring the autographs of Lincoln, Grant, Arthur and others. Photo courtesy American History Museum

What propelled Lord to pursue this quest with such a patriotic fervor? Although details are scarce, it may have been a labor of love. “She had married Henry Lord, but she was only 17 at the time,” Bowman says. “She was interested in someone before that—or he was a very close friend at least—and he was killed early in the war.”

The words Lord put down about her famous quilt late in life bespeak the emotion she would have invested in such an effort. “The various people who have brought it on exhibition have not been very careful of it,” she pointedly wrote. “I have never thought of disposing of it, but having lost my home through fire, I wish to rebuild, and this is the only way I can see to raise money.”

Ultimately, though, Lord was able to hang on to the quilt, and resettled in the D.C. area. “The quilt was never actually sold, but instead passed to her daughter, who brought it to the Smithsonian in 1943,” Bowman says.

Now at the American History Museum, the autograph quilt is not currently on display, but it may viewed it as part of the behind-the-scenes quilt tours conducted the second and fourth Tuesday of every month. A virtual tour of the quilt collection is also available, through which visitors can see Lord’s autographed quilt along with more than 400 others.

Artist Guy Maccoy at work on a mural at the Brooklyn Museum as part of the WPA's Art Work for Public Buildings Project. Photo courtesy Archives of American Art

Wikipedia, the most widely used encyclopedia on the world, consistently ranks among the web’s top sites and garners instant recognition among nearly all internet users. A related project—Wikimedia Commons, a source of free-use, public domain photos, video and other multimedia available to anyone—is less widely known, but essential for supplying multimedia content for Wikipedia articles.

Earlier this month, the Wikimedia Foundation (the umbrella organization for both of these wiki projects, as well as several others) began a landmark collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution when the Archives of American Art donated a trove of 285 WPA-era photographs to the Commons database.

“We’ve been interested in Wikipedia for years, but we didn’t really know how big the Foundation was and the efforts of the Commons until Sarah Stierch came on,” says Sara Snyder, an IT specialist at the Archives of American Art. Stierch became the Smithsonian’s first “Wikipedian-in-Residence” this summer at the Archives, as part of Wikimedia’s “GLAM” Project (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) that strives to increase the flow of information between these institutions and Wikimedia.

“She really opened our eyes to how many opportunities there are, not just editing articles, but being able to donate or share content on the Wikimedia platform through the Commons,” Snyder says.

The Archives team started out by trying to find a batch of photos without any intellectual property restrictions that would be appropriate for a donation. “The first thing we thought of was, ‘well, what do we have that’s public domain?’” says Stierch. “This collection was a clear candidate, because first of all, it’s really engaging, and it’s all created by the government, so its clearly in the public domain,” says Snyder.

The images donated are all part of the Archives’ collection of Works Progress Administration (WPA) photography, and this is the first time they are available to the public in a high-resolution, digitized format. The WPA was a Great Depression-era government program intended to provide relief for the unemployed. In addition to completing infrastructure and education projects, the WPA commissioned artists to produce paintings, murals and sculptures. Many of the photographs in the donation detail these activities, while others were creative assignments for exhibitions and photo murals.

“The different types of people and artists featured, it’s really remarkable,” says Stierch. “We’ve got photographs of works being created—showing the techniques of how to make a lithograph, how to make stained glass, how they sketch these giant murals. It’s a really varied collection of photographs, showing all different processes of art creation, documenting some of the most important as well as some of the lesser-known artists of the 20th century.”

As a collection of multimedia intended for unrestricted use, the Wikimedia Foundation anticipates these photos being used for anything from education to artistic inspiration.

“We hope that art students will look at these photographs and find inspiration in them. We hope that they’re going to be utilized in Wikimedia projects, whether its Wikipedia articles on these artists or anything else,” Stierch says. “If someone can find some educational or aesthetic or special value in these photographs, and I know they will, that’s what we hope comes out of it.”

Stierch and Snyder both envision this donation as the beginning of a long-lasting collaboration between the Wikimedia Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. “There are 19 units of the Smithsonian, and a lot of those have photographs or images in their collections that are in the public domian, everything from dinosaur bones to WPA paintings,” Stierch says. “It all comes down to what is valuable for the public to be able to learn from.”