Five Ways to Reinvent Traditional Thanksgiving Dishes

Why have plain old pumpkin pie when you could be eating a pumpkin-filled chocolate balloon?

An assortment of squash

Beyond the Butternut: A Guide to Selecting a Great Winter Squash

They all taste great with a simple bake in the oven, but each has some characteristics that make it unique

Anonymous Donor looms, at more than ten feet tall. “As you are walking through it you’re just engulfed by the object,” says curator Nicholas Bell.

The Renwick Reopens

Artist Chakaia Booker Gives Tires a Powerful Retread

Booker empowers her monumental sculptures with new life, shaped by the shearing and bending and folding of repurposed rubber

Sinatra on the radio

Listen to Never-Before-Released Tracks From Frank Sinatra’s Earliest Years on the Radio

You haven’t heard Ol’ Blue Eyes quite like this

Poster, Gib acht sonst . . [Be Careful or Else . .], 1929–30.

When “Danger” Is Art’s Middle Name

A new exhibit looks at the inspiration that comes from the clash of glory and catastrophe

Yes, we have no bananas: Bananas may be plentiful on store shelves today, but since Americans commercially eat only one variety, our banana supply (like many other foods) is vulnerable to disease or other dangers.

Age of Humans

How Globalization and Climate Change Are Taking Away Our Favorite Foods

In a new book, author Simran Sethi argues that we are facing one of the most radical shifts in food ever.

A Byzantine-style motif is woven on 18th-century looms by the weavers of Bevilacqua. A winged lion is the symbol of St. Mark, the city’s patron saint, and of the city. Mario e Paola Bevilacqua, 337/b, San Marco, Fondamenta della Canonica.

Smithsonian Journeys Travel Quarterly: Venice

Nine Luxury Gifts You Can Only Find in Venice

This gigantic piece of chalk art was created by dozens of artists in attempt to snag a Guinness World Record for Largest Anamorphic Pavement Art.

These 3D Pavement Paintings Take Chalk Art to a New Level

The pavement becomes a playground at the Sarasota Chalk Festival

Echelman's sculpture is inspired by data supplied by NASA and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, measuring the effects of the earthquake and tsunami that ravaged Tohoku, Japan in 2011.

The Renwick Reopens

How One Artist Learned to Sculpt the Wind

Artist Janet Echelman studied ancient craft, travel the world and now collaborates with a team of specialists to choreograph the movement of air

Movilă: "I was near the Bataclan café and I saw two girls. I saw this one in front of me starting to really scream and cry. I took several photographs of her and posted one to Facebook, and it was picked up by another account. This girl wrote me, 'Cristian, I am the girl in the photo.' She lost her two close friends."

Photographer Cristian Movilă’s Eyewitness Photos of the Attack on Paris and its Aftermath

The experienced photographer says that nothing could have prepared him for what he saw

None

Spectacular High Fashion Rises From a Landscape of Trash

Photographer Fabrice Monteiro conjures the specter of environmental ruin

Ask Smithsonian 2017

When Did the Vice Presidency Stop Going to the 2nd Place Winner and More Questions From Our Readers

Also up for discussion—why are oceans seawater and not freshwater?

In 1856, a Nantucket sailor sketched the killing of his crew’s “100-barrel” prize.

How Nantucket Came to Be the Whaling Capital of the World

Ron Howard’s new film “In the Heart of the Sea” captures the greed and blood lust of the Massachusetts island

In the movie The Martian, Matt Damon plays a stranded astronaut who has to grow his own food on the red planet. What he did in the film isn't so far off from how we could grow food in harsh environments on Earth.

Age of Humans

What Growing Potatoes on Mars Means for Earth’s Farmers

Matt Damon made it look easy in the recent Hollywood blockbuster, but Mars and Earth aren’t really all that different after all

Dawe says he loved having to work with the Renwick building’s 19th-century architectural details as a backdrop.

The Renwick Reopens

Artist Gabriel Dawe Made a Rainbow Out of 60 Miles of Thread

The artwork is an optical illusion that delights the senses; as if the artist embroidered the air

A woman in traditional Aymara dress sits with her daughter and their honored human skull, or ñatita, and a bag of coca leaves during the 2015 Fiesta de las Ñatitas in Bolivia.

Meet the Celebrity Skulls of Bolivia’s Fiesta de las Ñatitas

Each November, the Aymara people honor their special bond with the helpful spirits of the deceased

Villareal’s piece, titled Volume (Renwick), holds pride of place above the museum’s historic grand stairway. It uses LEDs embedded in 320 mirrored stainless steel rods.

The Renwick Reopens

Leo Villareal’s 23,000 Points of Light Illuminate the Renwick Gallery

With tens of thousands of individual LEDS, a dangling light sculpture majestically redefines the grand staircase at the Renwick

Actor Bryan Cranston impulsively modeled the Heisenberg hat—now a museum artifact—while nervous curators looked on.

How Crystal Meth Made it Into the Smithsonian (Along with Walter White’s Porkpie Hat)

The wildly popular television show, depicting the dark side of the American Dream, reflects on the struggles of a recession-era middle class

American Ingenuity Awards

This Wildly Creative Art Project Transformed an Ugly Interstate Into a 2,400-Mile-Long Visual Masterpiece

Zoe Crosher and Shamim Momin are behind the effort to turn the classic American eyesore into true art

Bill Hader and Fred Armisen share a laugh at the Broadway Video offices in Beverly Hills, CA, surrounded by the tools of their trade for their new series, Documentary Now.

American Ingenuity Awards

Why Bill Hader and Fred Armisen Are Parodying Documentaries in Their Latest, Ingenious Project

The “SNL” veterans behind the sly new series “Documentary Now” add a layer of authenticity to the art of sending up nonfiction films

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