Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Exhibitions

Pozzi and her team at the Washed Ashore project, achieve a remarkable and convincing array of textures.

Age of Humans

There’s a Bunch of Animals at the Zoo this Summer Made Out of Ocean Garbage

Delightfully whimsical, the sculptures drive home the message that there’s a whole lot of trash washing ashore

Portraits of Infamy by Roger Shimomura, 2016

Commentary

The Public Puts Great Trust in Museums, and Now It’s Time Museums Trust the Public

A new exhibition, curated by the community, debuts this weekend at the Smithsonian

"One of the first questions I ask myself," says Washington, D.C.-based artist Linn Meyers is, "'How well can I approach the quirks of the architecture?'"

The Mesmerizing Results When a Museum Asks an Artist to Draw All Over Its Walls

Linn Meyers took on the monumental task of creating a 400-foot-long artwork at the Hirshhorn

Portrait of the Marquise de Pompadour by Maurice Quentin de La Tour, between 1748 and 1755, currently at the Louvre Museum.

Cool Finds

Madame de Pompadour’s Legacy as a Patron of Arts Is Often Overlooked

A new exhibit explores the creative works of one of history’s most famous mistresses

One of a series of psychedelic concert posters done by artist Wes Wilson between 1966 and 1968 for concert promoter Bill Graham of San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium

How a Psychedelic Concert Poster Rocked the World

C’mon baby light my flier

A biocube is placed in Central Park's Hallett Nature Sanctuary in New York City.

You’d Be Astounded to Learn How Much Wildlife Can Fit Into One Cubic Foot

A whole new world opens up when you try to catalog every visible creature that moves in and out of a biocube set down on either land or in water

Indians with Umbrellas, 1971.

How Native American Artist Fritz Scholder Forever Changed the Art World

An exhibit in Denver looks at why we should all be grateful that Scholder broke his word

Jon Lovitch stands in front of the 2013 incarnation of GingerBread Lane. The village becomes larger and more elaborate each year.

Behold: The World’s Largest (Three-Ton) Gingerbread Village

Experience the glory of GingerBread Lane

A Stormtrooper Mask

Austria

These Are the “Star Wars” Exhibitions You Are Looking For

Grab your light saber and celebrate the art of the movie series at museums around the world

Kay WalkingStick's five-decade career is honored in a major retrospective, “Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist,” at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.

A Long Overdue Retrospective for Kay WalkingStick Dispels Native Art Stereotypes

At the American Indian Museum, the new show traces a career that included minimalist works to monumental landscapes

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

Girl Behind Bottle (Jean Patchett) by Irving Penn, New York, 1949, printed 1978

A Major Retrospective of Photographer Irving Penn Includes Previously Unseen Works

At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, view works from the master photographer’s 70-year career

Animaris Percipiere, 2005.

The Strange, Giant “Beach Animals” That Are About to Invade America’s Shores

Artist Theo Jansen’s sculptures first became hits on YouTube. Now they’ve reached the shores of New England

Thought to be the world's oldest existing running shoe, this footwear dates back to the early 1860s.

Running Shoes Date Back to the 1860s, and Other Revelations From the Brooklyn Museum’s Sneaker Show

A show on sneaker culture at the Brooklyn Museum hypes its modern Nikes, but perhaps most fascinating are the historic kicks that started it all

The Evolution of Money, From Feathers to Credit Cards

Coin collectors, and trinket lovers welcome back the National Numismatic Collections to its splendid new gallery at the American History Museum

The "Queer Threads" exhibition, which ran in early 2014, examined the diversity of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer experiences.

Urban Explorations

What it Took to Create the World’s First Gay Art Museum

Charles Leslie’s passionate half-century of homoerotic art collecting offers a mirror for the history of gay history itself

A stunning, modern wing of the Royal Library of Copenhagen, added in 1999.

The World’s Most Interesting (and Accessible) Library Collections

From the Magna Carta to Winnie the Pooh, what you can see at some of the world’s great libraries

Commemorate the storied document's 800th anniversary with a few special accessories.

The Ridiculous World of Magna Carta Kitsch

Throughout the United Kingdom, retailers are going mad over an 800-year-old document

Amager Resource Center, Copenhagen, Denmark. Under construction. This power plant, which turns household waste into electricity, is the cleanest in the world. "Normally, you want to be as far away from the power plant as possible because of the toxins, but in this case you literally have fresh mountain air on the roof of the building. Since we have snow in Denmark, but we don't have hills, we made the roof into a big ski slope," Ingels explains. The chimney puffs a giant steam ring each time a ton of carbon dioxide is emitted.

Designing Buildings For Hot Climates, Cold Ones and Everything in Between

A decade’s worth of sustainable projects by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and his firm, BIG, are now on display at the National Building Museum

The first official exhibition exclusively of Star Wars costumes, "Rebel, Jedi, Princess, Queen: Star Wars and the Power of Costume," opens at Seattle's EMP Museum on January 31, 2015.

Inside the Three-Decade Evolution of “Star Wars” Costumes

A Smithsonian traveling exhibition offers an unprecedented glimpse at costumes from a galaxy far, far away

Page 46 of 48