Back in March of this year, just as the world as we know it came to a screeching halt, I brought word to you all about the then all-set-to-open Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, as well as the remarkable book of the same name by Eleanor Jones Harvey that was published by Princeton University Press to accompany it. Needless to note – it didn’t open due to public health restrictions.
What with all the museums having been closed for so long now (don’t even remind me of the Humboldt exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that never even opened…), I was very pleased to be graced with the arrival recently of a new book from Smithsonian Books that is essentially a museum exhibition of Henry Walter Bates’ journals from his Amazon explorations in the mid Nineteen Century presented in printed and bound form.
On 20 March 2020, a new grand exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum titled “Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture” was scheduled to open. It was to be the “first to examine Humboldt’s impact on five spheres of American cultural development: the visual arts, sciences, literature, politics, and exploration, between 1804 and 1903.
Needless to note, it didn’t open.
In honor of the opening of the Smithsonian Libraries’ new “Once There Were Billions” exhibit, Joel Greenberg, author of the recently published A Feathered River Across the Sky; The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction will be delivering a lecture titled “Echoes of Their Wings: The Passenger Pigeon and its Legacy” followed by a book signing on Tuesday, […]