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November 21, 2008

Dear Coalition Friends:

The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History on the National Mall reopens today after a 2-year makeover.  Some of us from the National Coalition to Save Our Mall attended a preview yesterday.   See Thursday's front page story in The Washington Post for an overview of the renovation and the somewhat mixed review of the reorganized collection in today's The New York Times, excerpted below.  For the full stories, click on the links provided.

One of our first realizations as we reviewed what we saw--only a portion of the still unfolding collection--was that this Museum is beginning to fill a huge gap in the American story told on the Mall.  

A second revelation was that with the reopening of this museum dedicated to the overall American narrative--including sections on the American Revolution, Civil War, Vietnam, Korea, World War II and Civil Rights--there should be no need for individual interpretive centers/bookstores at the memorials and monuments on the Mall.   The monuments should be allowed to speak for themselves.

A critical question asked of this Museum by the commission that in 2002 called for its overhaul was, What does it mean to be an American?  

That's a question our Coalition has been asking also about the National Mall--where 8th grade classes from all over the country come each year to learn our history, not to mention millions of other visitors.  How well does the rest of the Mall tell our story?   How could that narrative be improved?  

THE WASHINGTON POST

America's Attic Is Ready for Its Public

With Orders to Get Organized and More Relevant, The American History Museum Reinvents Itself

By Jacqueline Trescott
Thursday, November 20, 2008; A01

The National Museum of American History -- home to a broad mix of historical and pop-culture treasures from the Star-Spangled Banner to Julia Child's kitchen -- reopens tomorrow after an $85 million overhaul.

Six years ago, a blue-ribbon commission appointed by the museum faulted the facility for being incoherent and disorganized, and "lacking aesthetic appeal" and balance. It was portrayed as a mess, even though at its peak, more than 5 million people a year found their way through its cluttered hallways. It's the third-most-visited museum on the Mall.

A vigorous rethinking of how to tell the American story and display a selection of its more than 3 million objects, as well as renovation of the physical structure, required the museum to close for two years. The central part of the building was dramatically altered; other areas are scheduled to be redone by 2014, in time for the museum's 50th anniversary, according to Director Brent D. Glass.

Smithsonian officials wanted the retooled facility to be encyclopedic but also to connect with every visitor. Glass, director since 2002, called it a "transformation project."

...Now the main themes and presentations have landmark artifacts outside the subject galleries. For example, the Vassar telescope, a large 1865 American-made refracting telescope used by Maria Mitchell, the country's first female astronomer, introduces the science and innovation wing. "We wanted them to be symbolic of a certain theme of American history and orient the visitors," Glass explained.

On the third floor, the Greensboro lunch counter, from the site of 1960s student sit-ins, has been given a prominent place. It introduces subjects on American ideals and social history. Adjacent to that corridor is a gallery that will preview what the National Museum of African American History and Culture will explore.

In the wing opposite the lunch counter is the venerable George Washington statue, a feature of the Smithsonian Institution since 1908. "The statue reflects political leadership and the lunch counter reflects reform, saying we are not satisfied with the status quo," Glass said.

...The center of the 44-year-old museum was the first target for renewal; plans for work on the east and west wings are, well, in the wings. The result is akin to two distinct buildings, with older exhibits still in place, showing their age against the jazzy newcomers.

...Another long-held criticism of the museum, restated by the blue-ribbon commission, was the absence of a timeline and introductory exhibition. "The plan for the introductory exhibition is going a little longer than I liked, but I think people expect a timeline," Glass said. "People always say, 'I didn't like history' because they had to memorize dates. We don't want to reinforce that. So we are organizing around changing points, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe writing 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and the election of FDR." He added that reinterpretations of materials had started before the blue-ribbon verdicts.

The next phase for the rebuilding is expected to start in two years, Glass said.

*********************

THE NEW YORK TIMES

America’s Attic, Ready for a Second Act

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
November 21, 2008

WASHINGTON — When the National Museum of American History reopens on Friday after two years and $85 million of renovation, it may begin to shed its reputation as one of the more cramped and confounding corners of the Smithsonian Institution. The nickname “America’s Attic” may still come in handy now and then for describing the Smithsonian’s network of museums, with their squirreled-away treasures, but at the history museum a central five-story atrium now streams with daylight, promising other forms of illumination as the visitor heads off to the new or refreshed displays, with others to open in the next few months.

This doesn’t mean that the museum has solved its considerable problems — some loom larger now, simply because expectations are higher and more renovations are to follow in coming years. But the sense of change is dramatic. When you enter the atrium from the National Mall, you face a 40-foot-by-19-foot “waving flag” made of 960 reflective panels whose colors subtly shift as you move past — an abstract American flag that seems to affirm an interest in innovation while declaring the museum’s national role.

After all, this is the only national museum of American history as well as the largest history museum of any kind in the United States. Three million visitors a year were coming before the renovation. Its collection, with more than three million objects, ranges most famously from Jefferson’s writing desk, on which the Declaration of Independence was drafted, to Dorothy’s ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz.”

...This renovation, using a mix of public and private funds, was undertaken because of stinging criticisms made in 2002 by a commission that included historians, journalists, administrators and public figures. It was convened to help pull the institution out of a muck of controversy and confusion. There were concerns about the ways private donors might influence the museum’s perspective, objections to skewed political positions in exhibitions, and bewilderment about the museum’s focus. (Before 1980 it was the Museum of History and Technology.)

The commission report (online at http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/reports/brc/1a.htm.) called for a large-scale “transformation.” The museum, it said, lacked “aesthetic appeal, organizational coherence, and the perception of substantive balance.” Suggestions included opening up the central space of the museum, providing access to natural light, and identifying “important and iconic objects” in the collection that could serve as thematic markers in the museum’s 300,000 square feet of exhibition and public space.

All this was done in the redesign by Gary P. Haney and the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; the building’s 44-year-old infrastructure has also been overhauled. The museum’s geometry has become more clear, and six landmark objects, as the museum calls them, now signal the themes of the various wings: the John Bull locomotive stands at the entrance to one floor’s east wing, devoted to transportation and technology, for example, while Dumbo the elephant (in the shape of a ride car from Disneyland) flies in state at the entrance to west wing halls devoted to entertainment, sports and music.

This, though, was the easiest part of the transformation, which the museum’s director, Brent D. Glass, stresses will continue in coming years. It is more difficult to see whether any more profound interpretive change is in the offing because even in new material, it is not evident. 

...That is one of the strange things about this museum. I can’t think of another where individual objects are so impressive, while the whole is so out of focus. The result is not the creation of a historical context but the disruption of one. One looks for coherence in small things rather than in large — in the unchanged gallery displaying musical instruments, say, or the gallery in which, for six weeks, a rarely displayed copy of the Gettysburg Address on loan from the White House will be shown.

...Another exhibition, “The Price of Freedom,” from 2004, is a rare attempt to tell a narrative history: presenting an account of the nation’s wars — though here again we are all too often left in the dark about context and cause. Yet another, “Communities in a Changing Nation,” tries to give a picture of 19th-century industrialization and the experience of immigrant groups and black slaves, though it is strangely disjointed. In January a gallery will present a photographic exhibition created by the still nascent National Museum of African American History and Culture, but where will it fit in? It might be argued that the history of the American Indian or of slavery will be told more profoundly elsewhere on the Mall, and this museum can only tell American history in small pieces. But how can such themes — and so many others — be so casually treated when they are so central to the American experience? And how can a national museum not even attempt a major narrative history of this country that might set the stage for self-understanding?

Such a survey could also avoid a single perspective or monocular vision; that would only lead to exhibitions like “Science in American Life” from 1994, in which American science after 1940 takes on a villainous or banal cast with ominous innovations like atomic energy and insecticides mitigated by a few praiseworthy efforts (like the invention of the contraceptive pill). This interpretive filter omits so much, that an imaginative new science exhibition about invention and play is refreshing reproof.

The smartest exhibition here may be “Within These Walls ...” (2001): successive residents of a single house built in the 1760s in Ipswich, Mass., are used to trace the social and political history of two centuries. That is precisely what is missing from the museum as a whole: a sense that within these American borders varied individuals and groups have shaped a unified story that demands telling. The museum plans an “orientation” exhibition surveying American history (something urged by the panel); it will open a few years hence, but such a show should provide the spine of the museum rather than become an ornament.

“What does it mean to be an American?” That was the question the 2002 commission began with. Now, until more rigorous renovations occur, the answer seems to be that we are lovers of variety and sensation, cultivators of conflicting identities, and possessors of an unrequited yearning for coherence. 

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