Museums

Manifest: Thirteen Colonies is a photographic project and journey through the repositories of African-American material culture found in libraries, museums, and archives of the original thirteen English colonies. Conceived by photographer Wendel White...

From dynastic armories and curiosity cabinets to Gothic Revival castles, private collections, and modern museums, armor and weapons have been methodically collected, studied, and preserved for their artistic and historical importance, beginning in the...

In A Fool’s Errand (Smithsonian, 2019), Lonnie Bunch shares the vision and leadership he brought to the realization of the National Museum of African American History and Culture—a dream shared by many generations of Americans. Bunch’s deeply personal...

Responding to keen interest in last fall’s Reimagining Museums event, we have invited the speakers to return and continue the conversation. (Watch Discussion 1) As museums acknowledge their legacy as colonial institutions, many are reimagining their...

As museums have acknowledged their legacy as colonial institutions, many have reimagined their mission as agents of decolonization and social justice. The pandemic disruption, the Black Lives Matter movement, and other community issues are driving still...

The United States was in the early stages of Reconstruction when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, mandating that “all persons born in the United States” with the exception of American Indians be declared citizens. That December, the tension...

Robert Gardner Photography Fellow 2021 Wendel White, Distinguished Professor of Art at Stockton University, New Jersey, will use the 2021 Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography to work on Manifest: Thirteen Colonies, an ongoing photographic project of...

The Peabody Museum was founded at a time of epistemological and political turmoil, seven years after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and one year after the end of the Civil War. The chaotic decades following the war proved to be an...

The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago was the first American fair to feature anthropology. The new discipline had its own building, supervised by Frederic Putnam, then director of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum.It competed, however, with...