National Museum Of African American History And Culture Celebrates 1 Year

Windsor Johnston, NPR

September 24, 2017
"It's been one year since bells tolled along the East Coast, welcoming the newest Smithsonian to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Since then, the museum has attracted more than 3 million people of all races, colors and creed from across the nation and around the world — averaging about 8,000 visitors daily.

"This has become more than a museum. This has become a pilgrimage site," said Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, in an interview with The Associated Press.

The one-year celebration is highlighting the various aspects of African-American history through music, dance and storytelling. Exhibits at the museum range from the glass-topped casket used to bury lynching victim Emmett Till to a fedora owned by late pop superstar Michael Jackson.

Many of the artifacts come from people's homes and personal collections — like freed slave Joseph Trammel's tin wallet, handmade to protect his freedom papers.

"Because you have these collections, it allows people to open up and to share stories to find memories," Bunch told the AP. "I've heard many times people say, 'I forgot, but once I saw a segregated door or once I saw that washboard it brought back those memories.' "

More here. 

Multimillion-dollar project to update, restore and conserve historic hall at American Natural History Museum

Marsha Lederman, The Globe and Mail

September 25, 2017

"The Hall of Northwest Coast Indians is the American Museum of Natural History's oldest hall. A centrepiece on the New York museum's main floor, it is a treasure trove of totem poles, masks, rattles and other objects – most of them from Indigenous peoples in Canada.

On Monday, the museum announced a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project to update, restore and conserve the hall and enrich the interpretation of its exhibits. Representatives from the Haida, Kwakwaka'wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth and Tlingit communities were to be in New York for the announcement.

"We've been talking about this possibility ever since I arrived at the museum in 2001," said Peter Whiteley, the museum's curator of North American ethnology, in the division of anthropology, in an interview with The Globe and Mail. "This hall, while it did have some cosmetic changes in the late fifties and early sixties, is pretty much the same as it was in 1910, so we are absolutely thrilled that this is happening."

The renovation will see a number of items currently on display come down, with other pieces brought in from the museum's collection – all done in consultation with First Nations.

The hall, which opened in 1899, is a museum highlight and a top tourist destination, but it was also a game changer in the field of anthropology, with its revolutionary approach by anthropologist Franz Boas. This is where Boas made his argument for cultural relativism in museum interpretations of Indigenous cultures – with objects from each nation viewed within the context of that nation's particular culture. Boas grouped the works by nation rather than chronology or function. So you don't find a hodgepodge of spoons or masks from different communities grouped in one case. Crucially, this was a challenge to the prevailing approach of representing societies in evolutionary terms – on a trajectory from "primitive" to "advanced."

"It's an absolutely iconic hall in the history of anthropology – in the history of American intellectual life," Whiteley said."

More here. 

First African Contemporary Art Museum Opens in Capetown Amidst Controversy

Fredrick Ngugi, Face to Face Africa

September 24, 2017

"For a long time, contemporary African artists have struggled to find the right platform to showcase their work. They have always relied on foreign museums to exhibit their talent and make revenue.

But this is set to change with the launch of the first African contemporary art museum in Cape Town, South Africa. The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art was officially opened Friday, September 22, at an event that was presided over by the renowned South African Archbishop Desmund Tutu.

The museum has been characterized as Africa’s Tate Modern(an institution that houses England’s national collection of British art, and international contemporary art). Zeitz is the creation of the renowned British architect Thomas Heatherwick.

The arts center occupies a nine-storey building that previously served as a grain silo in Cape Town. Heatherwick, with the help of three local architecture firms, has transformed the building’s original cylinders into huge tubular shapes that stand in the middle of the BMW Atrium, the center’s main hall.

Zeitz Museum features more than 100 galleries, a sculpture garden on the roof, and six research centers dedicated to Art Education, Performative Practice, Curatorial Excellence, Photography, Costume Institute, and the Moving Image."

More here. 

It’s a Diverse City, but Most Big Museum Boards Are Strikingly White

Robin Pogrebin, August 22, 2017
The New York Times

"Mayor Bill de Blasio gave New York’s museums and arts groups an ultimatum last month: Take steps to make your staff and leadership more diverse, or risk losing part of your city funding.

The cultural organizations are starting with a mixed record. In a city known for its racial and ethnic diversity, the percentage of people of color serving on boards remains strikingly low at most institutions, and some elite Manhattan museums and arts groups employ overwhelmingly white staffs even as they try to attract a broad cross-section of visitors, according to data collected by The New York Times.

Becoming more diverse is clearly possible, the results also show. At the Studio Museum in Harlem, 82 percent of the board members are people of color, compared with 25 percent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and 10 percent at New York City Ballet. Minority staff members also account for 66 percent of employees at the Brooklyn Museum, which prides itself on reaching a diverse audience, while they make up about 41 percent at MoMA PS 1.

The Times asked for the information from the cultural groups to get a snapshot of where they are starting. City officials, in assessing diversity, are also looking at categories like people’s gender, sexual orientation, age, and whether they have a disability. The Times focused on data specifically about racial diversity because increasing it is perhaps the biggest challenge for many of these institutions.

The information reflects findings in a study last year that city officials called “troubling”: While 67 percent of New York City residents identify as people of color, only 38 percent of employees at cultural organizations describe themselves that way."

More here. 

Smithsonian’s African American History Museum Releases Statement on Charlottesville and Confederate Memorials

Beth Py-Lieberman, August 20, 2017

Smithsonian Magazine

"Lonnie G. Bunch, the Smithsonian's founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, has released a statement on behalf of the museum following the tragic deaths at Charlottesville on Saturday, August 12, 2017.

Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal, was killed when a car driven by a sympathizer of the Ku Klux Klan drove his car into a crowd of protesters. Two Virginia State Troopers, H. Jay Cullen, 48, and Berke Bates, 40, also died when their surveillance helicopter crashed during the white nationalist rally.

"Recognizing the history of violence in support of white supremacy," says Bunch in a statement, "is only part of fully understanding the events of recent days."

Bunch, who has often taken an assertive stance in the court of public opinion, has long practiced a tradition of bringing historical analysis to events of the day, wrote in Smithsonian magazine: "The Smithsonian is the great convener, bringing diverse points of view into contact. A primary goal of the museum is to help America find whatever peace it can over issues of race.""
Read more here. 

Paris's Centre Pompidou to Open Satellite Branch in Shanghai

Katerine McGrath, Architectural Digest

July 19, 2017

"A little bit of Paris is landing in Shanghai. The Centre Pompidou in Paris has just announced its long-awaited cultural partnership with Shanghai's new West Bund Art Museum, which will host a satellite gallery for the Paris museum in the Chinese cultural capital. The wing is to be called the Centre Pompidou Shanghai (West Bund), and already has 20 exhibitions slated over the course of the initial five-year run.

The collaboration was cemented by the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between France and China, with the hopes of inspiring future cultural communication between the two countries. Works from the Pompidou's collection will be on display at West Bund, and over time the Pompidou is expected to show some of China's most amazing masterpieces as well. The Pompidou hails this as a "first step" in the collaboration between the two institutions.

Construction of the West Bund Art Museum is already under way, with a scheduled completion date of 2018 and an opening in 2019. The David Chipperfield–designed structure will live on the bank of the Huangpu River as part of the West Bund Museum Mile. Other museums on the seven-mile stretch of land include the Long Museum, the Yuz Museum, the Shanghai Center of Photography, the Tank Shanghai Art Park, and the Start Museum.

The deal has been under negotiations for over a decade, and, now that it's signed, the partnership will commence in 2019. This isn't the first satellite post for the Pompidou, which already boasts a series of branch galleries in Málaga, Spain; Metz, France; and one planned for Brussels. When it first opened in 1977, the Paris Pompidou was applauded for its revolutionary design that places its mechanical and system infrastructures on the outside of the building, painted in vibrant hues. The museum is home to some 12,000 works of art and is considered to be the second most important collection of modern art after New York's MoMA."

More here. 

Canada: In an era of ‘fake news,’ people are turning to museums for facts

Stephanie Levitz, The Canadian Press, The Star
July 9, 2017

"During peak tourist season, thousands of people stream into Canada’s national museums each day — and this summer is already shaping up to be even stronger than usual in Ottawa, thanks to Canada 150 celebrations.

But the spike in visits isn’t just about the summer.

Museums say it’s also about a quirk of the present age: a proliferation of false information online that has made separating fact from fiction all the more a challenge.

That’s leading people to increasingly seek out museums as a primary source of information and in turn leading institutions to think a bit differently about how they do things.

“There is so much — for lack of a better term, I will call it noise — there are so many different stories: ‘What is news? Is it fake news? What’s going on?’ ” said Fern Proulx, chief executive officer of three of Ottawa’s national museums.

“Museums are a trusted source of information. We need to be prominent in that space.”

The three museums Proulx oversees — Agriculture and Food, Science and Technology and Aviation and Space — collectively rebranded themselves last month as part of their effort toward renewed relevancy.

Their new moniker is Ingenium: Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation, a nod to the human ingenuity behind their extensive collection of more than 100,000 objects and hundreds of thousands of books, historical photographs and archival documents."

More here. 

A Noose at the Smithsonian Brings History Back to Life, The New York Times

The New York Times, Lonnie G. Bunch

June 23, 2017

"The person who recently left a noose at the National Museum of African American History and Culture clearly intended to intimidate, by deploying one of the most feared symbols in American racial history. Instead, the vandal unintentionally offered a contemporary reminder of one theme of the black experience in America: We continue to believe in the potential of a country that has not always believed in us, and we do this against incredible odds.

The noose — the second of three left on the National Mall in recent weeks — was found late in May in an exhibition that chronicles America’s evolution from the era of Jim Crow through the civil rights movement. Visitors discovered it on the floor in front of a display of artifacts from the Ku Klux Klan, as well as objects belonging to African-American soldiers who fought during World War I. Though these soldiers fought for democracy abroad, they found little when they returned home.

That display, like the museum as a whole, powerfully juxtaposes two visions of America: one shaped by racism, violence and terror, and one shaped by a belief in an America where freedom and fairness reign. I see the nooses as evidence that those visions continue to battle in 2017 and that the struggle for the soul of America continues to this very day.

The people responsible knew that their acts would not be taken lightly. A noose is a symbol of the racial violence and terror that African-Americans have confronted throughout American history and of the intensity of resistance we’ve faced to any measure of racial equality. During slavery, one of the main purposes of lynching was to deter the enslaved from escaping to freedom. But lynching did not end with slavery; it was also a response to the end of slavery. It continued from the 1880s until after the end of World War I, with more than 100 people lynched each year. So prevalent was this atrocity that between 1920 and 1938, the N.A.A.C.P. displayed a banner at its national headquarters that read simply, “A man was lynched yesterday.”

Lynching was not just a phenomenon of the American South or the Ku Klux Klan. And in many places, as black people fought for inclusion in American life, lynchings became brutal spectacles, drawing thousands of onlookers who posed for photographs with the lifeless bodies. This collective memory explains why the noose has become a symbol of white supremacy and racial intimidation."

More here.

New Yale Partner Faulted for Handling of Tribal Artifacts

Leslie MacMillian and Tom Masberg, The New York Times

May 10, 2017

"A 210-year-old seminary here that is in the process of joining Yale Divinity School is coming under fire from federal regulators for failing to follow a law designed to ensure the return of sacred and other special artifacts to Native American tribes.

The Newton Andover Theological School has a collection of 158 Native American items, including locks of hair, wampum belts, “peace pipes” and finely beaded ceremonial garb, mostly gathered in the 19th century by Christian missionaries. For about 70 years, the artifacts have been housed at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.

But the museum alerted the United States Department of the Interior two years ago when the Newton school, which is struggling with low enrollment, proposed selling some items to raise money. Officials quickly warned the school that a sale would violate a federal law that says any organization that receives federal funding must make every effort to return any spiritual or culturally significant items it holds to the tribes.

Last week, federal officials sent another warning letter to the seminary because it still has not complied by sending inventories of the items to tribes, as required.

“Is Andover being negligent or incompetent?” David Tarler, a federal official tasked with enforcing the law, said in an interview. “Are they confused about the law but acting in good faith? I can’t answer that question.”

School officials said they “abruptly pivoted” after the initial warning in 2015 and decided that no sale would take place. They blame delays on the difficulty of searching spotty historical records to determine which objects might belong to what tribes."

More here.

‘Encyclopedic’ Brooklyn Museum Vies for Contemporary Attention

Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times

April 30, 2017

"Brooklyn’s time may have come. But what of the Brooklyn Museum’s?

With art enthusiasts and donors increasingly enamored by contemporary art, and the borough now officially hot, the Brooklyn Museum is struggling to preserve and promote its identity as a serious encyclopedic institution that spans thousands of years. As leaders there are finding, it isn’t easy to attract paying customers with historic collections.

While many museums with comprehensive collections face similar challenges in keeping up with trends, the Brooklyn Museum is also facing serious financial pressures. To deal with a budget deficit of about $3 million, the museum has undergone two rounds of buyouts and halted acquisitions.

The museum’s board seems to have bet on a contemporary emphasis by choosing a new director with a background in that field, Anne Pasternak. Yet she needs to find her own balance between recent art and the museum’s vast holdings in pre-20th-century work."

More here.

Native America’s Necessary And Imperfect Law, Chip Colwell for HuffPost

Chip Colwell, HuffPost

April 28, 2017

"In the spring of 1872, the skull of an Apache woman was dug up from the earth. The year before she had been among 100 Apaches massacred by a vigilante group from Tucson, who believed her people, the Aravaipa and Pinal bands, had perpetrated a series of raids. (They were likely committed by unrelated Chiricahua Apaches.) The woman’s skull was exhumed by a U.S. Army surgeon named Valery Havard who hoped the skeletal remains could serve the new science of anthropology. He signed his name on the side of the skull and deposited it in the collections of the Army Medical Museum. The skull was later transferred to “America’s Attic,” the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History where it would stay for more than a century.

In 2013, the Smithsonian relinquished the woman’s skull to a group of Aravaipa Apache descendants for reburial. This would not have been possible except for federal laws guiding a process called repatriation—the return of human remains and cultural items to their homelands. For decades museum administrators and Native Americans clashed over the fate of collections—debating whether such objects honored humanity’s common heritage or they violated the human rights of Native Americans. These federal laws have done much to help end the war. But too many battles continue on.

Valery Havard’s action was not unique: Since 1620, when Pilgrims first plundered an Indian grave out of curiosity, Americans have habitually collected Native American remains as curios or objects of study. That habit became federal policy in 1868 when the U.S. Surgeon General ordered military personnel to collect skulls from battlefields, cemeteries, hospitals, and graves. Indian bodies soon became a cornerstone of American museums, used to build racial hierarchies that purported to show Europeans as intellectually and emotionally superior."

More here.

Reuniting Indigenous 'sticks' with their stories: the museum on a mission to give back

The Guardian, Paul Daley

March 3, 2017

"John Carty stands on a platform inside a vast warehouse on Adelaide’s outskirts. On the floor below and behind him are rack after rack of shelves and drawers housing tens of thousands of Australian Indigenous artefacts.

There are about 5,000 spears and 3,000 boomerangs here, and hundreds upon hundreds of shields, thousands of pieces of decorative art and costume, and all sorts of curios – from the crayons the Adelaide tram driver-cum-ethnologist-cum-autodidact Charles Mountford encouraged the desert people to draw with, to a “pearl shell” fashioned from a buffed tin lid that was collected on the Canning stock route.

It’s the biggest single collection of Australian Indigenous material culture in the world. And much if it is here in storage for the South Australian Museum, Australia’s second oldest – and one of its most traditional – collecting institutions. Most of it will never see the light of day in exhibitions, or be displayed in the public galleries, which are already filled to bursting with other Indigenous objects.

And so these items stay in this vast aircraft hangar-like structure because of enduring empirical and colonial collection practices. That may, however, be changing quickly. 

Carty, the museum’s 39-year-old head of anthropology, surveys the collection from up here, a red rag, potentially, to the museological conservatives who are content with orthodoxy.

He shakes his head and says: “These kinds of collections are utterly meaningless without Aboriginal people attached to them. Without Aboriginal voices and families and meanings, they are just pieces of wood – just sticks without stories.”

Carty aims to connect these items with the descendants of the people who made and used them. They are the living who believe ancestral spirits are incarnate in these objects, that all of this wood, animal bone, shell, stone and fibre encompasses the history of the land and the creationist animals of a past that dwarfs by tens of thousands years the comparative minutes elapsed since colonisation."

More here.

Egypt: Aswan Museum's Annex Opened to the Public After Almost Six-Year Closure

All Africa, February 21, 2017

"Egypt's Minister of Antiquities Khaled al-Anany opened on Tuesday the Aswan Museum's annex, located on the Elephantine Island, to the public after almost six years of closure.

Established over two years, the annex is located 10 meters north of the Museum and contains three display rooms that host 1,788 artefacts discovered during the joint German-Swiss expedition to the island in the period 1969-1998.

Surveillance cameras and fire extinguishers were installed in the annex, in addition to other renovations, according to the ministry's press release, as part of its plan to revive tourism in Egypt.

The opening also coincides with the solar phenomenon that takes place twice every year, on Feb. 22 and on Oct. 22, when the sun shines directly perpendicular on King Ramses' face. Hundreds of visitors attend the event every year.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi visited Aswan late January for the national youth conference. Concluding the conference, Sisi declared the intention to celebrate the passing of 200 years since the discovery of the Abu Simbel temple in Aswan.

The antiquities minister said the celebration will be postponed to Oct. 22 when the King Ramses solar phenomenon occurs again."

More here.

Bamiyan Cultural Center in Afghanistan to Open in 2018

ArtFourm

February 3, 2017

"Bamiyan Cultural Center—a state-of-the-art complex and research facility dedicated to preserving culture, raising awareness about heritage, and enriching community life by organizing a series of cultural events including festivals, films, music, and dance—in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, is scheduled to open in the summer of 2018, Hannah McGivern of the Art Newspaper reports.

Located at the UNESCO world heritage site where the Taliban razed the sixth-century monumental rock-cut Buddha statues, known as the Bamiyan Buddhas, in 2001, the 26,372-square-foot facility designed by the Argentinian firm M2R Arquitectos will include two galleries, a performance hall, and a tea house. The $2.5 million project is being funded by the South Korean government. The Afghan ministry of urban development has approved $1.5 million to build a garden at the site.

Despite UNESCO’s decision not to rebuild the statues, German archaeologists have partially reconstructed one of the Buddha’s feet. While the Afghan government supports the conservation project, UNESCO continues to dismiss it. “We think any reconstruction will essentially be a fake because of lack of original material,” UNESCO’s assistant director-general for culture, Francesco Bandarin said. UNESCO will release further recommendations on the estimated $12 million project in October."

More here.

MoMA Protests Trump Entry Ban by Rehanging Work by Artists from Muslim Nations

The New York Times
Jason Farago, February 3, 2017

In one of the strongest protests yet by a major cultural institution against President Trump’s executive order on immigration, the Museum of Modern Art has rehung part of its permanent collection with works by artists from some of the majority-Muslim nations whose citizens are blocked from entering the United States.

Seven works by artists such as the Sudanese painter Ibrahim el-Salahi, the Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid, and the Los Angeles-based Iranian video artist Tala Madani, were installed Thursday night in MoMA’s fifth-floor galleries, replacing seven works by Picasso, Matisse and Picabia, among other Western artists. Alongside each work is a wall text that plainly states the museum’s intentions: “This work is by an artist from a nation whose citizens are being denied entry into the United States, according to a presidential executive order issued on Jan. 27, 2017. This is one of several such artworks from the Museum’s collection installed throughout the fifth-floor galleries to affirm the ideals of welcome and freedom as vital to this Museum as they are to the United States.”

More here.

National Museum Of The American Indian Plans To Build Native American Veterans Memorial

DCist

Lauren Landau, February 3, 2017

"By 2021, visitors to the National Mall should have another military monument to add to their tour. But unlike the WWII or Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the National Native American Veterans Memorial will pay tribute not to a specific conflict, but to the service of an entire ethnic group.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) are leading the effort to publicly and permanently honor Native warriors with a prominent memorial on the museum's grounds.

Rebecca Trautmann, project coordinator for the National Native American Veterans Memorial Project, says fundraising is still in the early stages, but the plan is to raise $15 million.

What the memorial will look like will be decided through a design competition. But before the museum and NCAI invite artists to submit their ideas, they’re asking veterans for theirs.

“We’re visiting tribal communities across the country, including Alaska and Hawaii, to talk with tribal leaders and Native veterans to share plans for the memorial and to hear from them about their experiences serving in the military, Trautmann says. Organizers are also asking, “about the reasons they chose to serve and about their recommendations for what this memorial needs to convey to the public about this tradition of service.”"

More here.

Royal Ontario Museum apologizes for racist 1989 African exhibit

The Star, Jackie Hong

November 9, 2016
They waited 27 years for an apology.

And on Wednesday night, the African-Canadians who had decried the Royal Ontario Museum’s 1989-1990 exhibit, Into the Heart of Africa, as racist and demeaning finally got one.

The show featured artifacts taken from the continent by Canadian missionaries and soldiers.

“. . . Into the Heart of Africa perpetuated an atmosphere of racism,” ROM deputy director of collections and research Mark Engstrom said to a crowd of dozens who attended the reconciliation between the museum and the Coalition For the Truth About Africa, who had protested the exhibit in 1989 and 1990.

“The ROM expresses its deep regret for having contributed to anti-African racism. The ROM also officially apologies for the suffering incurred by the members of the African-Canadian community.”


CFTA chief spokesperson Rostant Rico John accepted the apology.

“We want our community to know: the ROM did not slip or slide, nor hide. They came forward and showed themselves and worked with us,” John said, explaining that the reconciliation process began back in 2014.

“. . . I would like to formally accept, on behalf of the African community in Canada here, the apology of the ROM,” he said to applause and cheers.

The event, which opened with a Ghanian priest in traditional robes performing a group prayer, also saw speeches from CFTA members Afua Cooper and Yaw Akyeaw, who flew in from Ghana, where they recalled protesting Into the Heart of Africa outside the museum and the hardships demonstrators faced when they spoke out about the exhibit, including arrests and racism.

Both accepted the ROM’s apology and commended the museum’s effort in righting a wrong.

The event also gave a peek into what was to come; ROM director and CEO Josh Basseches said that over the next five years, the museum was committing to several initiatives to improve its relationship with the African-Canadian community, including introducing two internships for black youth interested in museums and creating more programs that focus on African or diaspora themes.

The ROM will also mount a “major exhibition,” planned for 2018, that “addresses the exclusion of blackness from mainstream Canadian historic narrative” through the work of seven contemporary black artists, Basseches added.

More here.

Illinois museum to return human remains to Michigan tribe

Detroit Free Press

September 3, 2016

"Native American bones and funerary objects that have been in a suburban Chicago museum collection for decades are on track to be returned to a Michigan-based tribe.

Lake County Forest Preserve District officials said most of the remains and other objects were unearthed at sites in Lake County, and one set came from McHenry County. They’ll be turned over to the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, which has lived in the Great Lakes region for centuries.

The artifacts have been in storage at the district’s Lake County Discovery Museum, and were donated in the late 1950s or early 1960s by the Lake County Museum of History."

More here.

Supported by the UN cultural agency, Nepal’s quake-damaged museums re-open

The UN News Center

August 10, 2016

More than a year since the devastating earthquakes that struck Nepal in April and May 2015, through the combined work of the United Nations cultural agency and its partners, some of the country’s notable museums and institutions, including the National Museum, and the National Art Gallery are once again open and visitors are coming back to enjoy their rich collections.

“The rehabilitation of Nepal’s museums and historical buildings following the 2015 earthquake has a deep, positive impact on the economic and social development of the country,” said Christian Manhart, Director of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Kathmandu Office in a news release issued last week by the agency.

“There is a tremendous sense of identity, determination and hope that comes with the reopening of museums and the restoration of temples,” he added. The Patan Museum and the Panauti Museum are also re-opening.

The earthquake and series of aftershocks killed more than 8,700 people, injured more than 22,000, and destroyed or damaged more than 250,000 houses. The disaster also badly affected the landlocked country’s cultural and natural heritage: 691 historic buildings in 16 districts were damaged, of which 131 fully collapsed.

More here.

Smithsonian and V&A to collaborate on exhibition space

BBC News

13 June 2016

The Smithsonian has announced plans to work together with the Victoria and Albert Museum on a major international collaboration in London.

A jointly organised permanent gallery space will become part of V&A East, in a cultural complex created in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

It will be the first time in 170 years the Smithsonian has opened a long-term exhibition venue outside of the US.

The Smithsonian's collection includes 137 million artefacts.

"We will be able to inspire and educate more people than ever before," said Smithsonian secretary David Skorton.

"With the V&A in London, we can build bridges to other countries and continents and share our work with the world."

More here.