Smithsonian American Art Museum

As I set out to write my first column as Digital Editor, a good friend suggested I examine the question of curatorial voice. What is it in these changing times? What roles do or should curators play in the age of social media? It seemed an appropriate topic through which to find my own role and voice in what is—for me—a new “platform”: Curator: The Museum Journal. I come to this topic from more than a decade of developing digital solutions for delivering interpretation in museums and online. In my days as a doctoral student in art history, I also curated a few exhibitions and presented my films in galleries and alternative spaces in England. Today—as I work with curators and others as head of New Media Initiatives for the Smithsonian American Art Museum—I find myself increasingly questioning where the boundaries lie between digital and analog, in-gallery and online, curator, interpreter, and agent of social media. Curator David Allison is chair of Information Technology and Communication, a curatorial department concerned with the history of IT, at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. During a strategic planning meeting at the Smithsonian in 2009, Allison produced lists of what’s “in” and “out” as the Institution enters the age of social media. I have borrowed a few items from his lists to point to the proximate future of museums and curating: Popular adoption of Web 2.0 and its progeny has coincided in the early twenty-first century with the development of new business models and practices. Fields like publishing and journalism, the auto industry, and health care are being reshaped by social media. Even the “stodgiest” of museums is not immune. Whether or not museums are actively embracing Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest, their visitors are. People share their own photos, videos, and links about and to museums around the world through platforms that are not in the museum’s control. Just to clarify our terminology: A platform is a medium through which information or content is published or exchanged. In this sense, a bricks-and-mortar museum is an analog platform. Common digital platforms now distribute museum content not only via museum websites, but also through the social platforms mentioned above (Flickr, YouTube, and so on). Although the museum may have a Flickr account, for example, the museum does not own or control the underlying Flickr site and its functionality. Moreover, people may publish their photos of the museum in their own online Flickr photo-albums, called “photostreams,” without any editorial control by the museum itself. In other words, the museum’s digital presence is no longer confined to its website. In consequence, it controls increasingly less of the digital media published about its collections. In fact, many museums now receive the majority of their visitors online.11 A study by José-Marie Griffiths, dean and professor, and Donald W. King, distinguished research professor, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, revealed that 45 percent of museum visits are by online visitors. The study, Interconnections: The IMLS National Study on the Use of Libraries, Museums and the Internet, was published as a series of reports (over several years, beginning in 2006) on the Web. See http://www.interconnectionsreport.org. What, then, is the museum’s responsibility to those who may never be able to visit the physical museum in person? How can the “real world” museum-encounter with the artifact be communicated to remote audiences? As museums expand globally across a range of platforms, they are undergoing a transformation. Steven Zucker, principal of Smarthistory.org and dean of the School of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), has described it as a transition from Acropolis—that inaccessible treasury on the fortified hill—to Agora, a marketplace of ideas offering space for conversation, a forum for civic engagement and debate, and opportunity for a variety of encounters among audiences and the museum. I would argue that this transformation is happening whether or not the museum chooses to be part of the conversation. But some museums have embraced the trend, even sourcing “citizen curators” and user-generated content. In 2007, for instance, Tate Britain used Flickr to crowdsource photographs as an online accompaniment for How We Are: Photographing Britain, the gallery’s first major photographic exhibition. A conventionally curated show, How We Are included images by famed British photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Lewis Carroll, and Julia Margaret Cameron, as well as postcards, family albums, and propaganda. Tate Britain invited the general public to post their own shots through the photo-sharing capabilities of Flickr.22 See http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/howweare/, accessed Aug. 30, 2009. At the Brooklyn Museum, Click!: A Crowd-Curated Exhibition gave the public the job of ranking photographs for an in-gallery display in 2008. The exhibition’s website gave the rationale: “Taking [the exhibition’s] inspiration from the critically acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds, in which New Yorker business and financial columnist James Surowiecki asserts that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals, Click! explores whether Surowiecki’s premise can be applied to the visual arts—is a diverse crowd just as “wise” at evaluating art as the trained experts?”33 See http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/, accessed Aug. 30, 2009. The project began with an open call to artists for photographs on the theme of “Changing Faces of Brooklyn.” Next came an online forum asking for audience evaluation of the works submitted; each citizen-curator answered “a series of questions about his/her knowledge of art and perceived expertise” and was invited to rank the works, which were then installed in the exhibition according to the results from the juried process.44 The Luce Foundation Center of the Smithsonian American Art Museum also uses Flickr to solicit “citizen curators” who help select artworks for display in its open storage area. The Torrance Art Museum in California plans to give citizen curators the key to the galleries: Its July 23, 2009 “Call for Proposals: On Gonzo Curating” invited “artists and curators (or anyone else for that matter) to present project proposals to the Torrance Art Museum.” (The project will display the results through—and perhaps beyond—the 2011/2012 exhibiting season.) The aim is to leverage the small museum’s ability “to react to moments in art, quickly (for a museum) and efficiently, within a limited budget,” and to use crowdsourcing. The term “crowdsourcing” was coined by Wired contributing editor Jeff Howe in 2006 to name the new practice of engaging a specific group, community, or the general public to perform tasks as a group that previously were undertaken by staff or contractors.55 Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,”Wired, Issue 14.06 - June 2006, accessed Sept. 13, 2009 at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html. Writing in a very personal voice, the Torrance Art Museum outsourced its exhibition programming to the crowd: To engage others, to become more collaborative and interactive with outside curators and professionals worldwide, to see our programming develop more hand-in-hand with a global enquiry and with curators in different contexts with different aims and agendas, alongside fulfilling our obligation to visually and intellectually engage a myriad of different types of visitor . . . .66 See http://www.torranceartmuseum.com/gonzocurating.php, accessed Aug. 30, 2009. TAM’s call for participants—which has no deadline, since the museum “sees this as an ongoing process of engagement”—concludes by stating that the museum “should be an artist’s museum, a curator’s museum and our audience’s museum for active engagement—so if this strikes a chord with you then feel free to send proposals to us.” Crowdsourcing is not confined to art museums or any museum’s physical building. For instance, Powerhouse Museum in Australia has published much of its collection online, but not all of the records are complete. In April 2009, a “citizen scientist” was looking on the Powerhouse website and found a record concerning an “Object” described as an “H7507 Inclinometer, (also called dipping compass or dip needle), made by Gambey, Paris.” The notice said that the object record was “currently incomplete. The information available may date back as far as 125 years. Other information may exist in a non-digital form.”77 You can download this image from http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/wp-content/gambey-h7507.png. Sharon Rutledge contacted Nick Lomb, the museum’s curator of astronomy, and helped identify the object and its provenance: the Gambey Dip Circle is a magnetic instrument from the historic Parramatta Observatory in Australia. As a result, a week later the record included three high-resolution (“Zoomify”) images and 746 words of text explaining its history, significance, and the story of its rediscovery in the Powerhouse collection.88 The newly revised object record can be found at http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/?irn=248651. For more of the story, see http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2009/04/27/another-opac-discovery-the-gambey-dip-circle-and-the-value-of-minimal-tombstone-data/. The Powerhouse Museum’s use of online tools to crowdsource enhanced information and understanding of the museum’s collection. This happy result points to new ways that curators and subject experts can collaborate in using social media. The Copenhagen Doctoral School of Cultural Studies, in conjunction with the Arken Museum of Modern Art and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, organized the conference, “Event Culture: The Museum and Its Staging of Contemporary Art,” in November 2009, in order to examine the changing role of contemporary art curators. The conference website describes the evolutionary pressures on the contemporary art museum. I will sum up its three points here: A shift from substance and solidity towards activity and performance, and from history to the contemporary. A privileging of the temporary exhibition over the permanent collection. Exhibitions that focus on creating events and sensations rather than generating knowledge.99 The University of Copenhagen, “Event Culture: The Museum and Its Staging of Contemporary Art,” November 6-7, 2009, accessed Aug. 30, 2009 at http://eventculture.ikk.ku.dk/. Looking through the lens of contemporary art museum practice, the conference organizers posit the role of curator as increasingly one of “storytelling” or generating narratives rather than producing classical art historical knowledge. If this trend continues under the impetus of social media and other twenty-first-century influences, the changing functions of the museum and the role of the curator “might indeed change the very role of art in society as well.” American Furniture / Googled, an exhibition of nineteenth-century furniture in the Decorative Arts Gallery at the Milwaukee Art Museum, took up the challenge to rethink curatorial praxis.1010 Milwaukee Art Museum, “American Furniture / Googled,” July 9-Oct. 11, 2009, accessed Aug. 30, 2009 at http://www.mam.org/exhibitions/details/americanFurniture.php. In a telephone interview, Melissa Buchanan, Mae E. Demmer Assistant Curator of Twentieth-century Design, explained to me how the in-gallery interpretation of nineteenth-century furniture drew on innovative new approaches, developed by the Chipstone Foundation, sponsors of the exhibition, for presenting collections to the public. In this experimental installation, traditional object labels were replaced by digital screens displaying Google search results for each object. Two terminals in the gallery, with open Internet access and minimal restrictions as to what kinds of websites visitors could not access, were also available so that visitors could follow those links and do further research in the galleries. Buchanan and her colleagues curated information from the Internet by selecting links to sites that they felt could significantly enhance the visitor’s experience of the exhibition, both in the gallery and online. In this case, the “wisdom of the crowd” (in interpreting art works) came not from an anonymous array of amateurs but rather from the websites of other museums, auction houses, interior design magazines, and scholarly blogs dedicated to furniture studies. American Furniture / Googled lays bare the research process and resources used by curators in developing their own expertise. Buchanan acknowledged in my interview with her that the role of the curator as subject expert is changing and becoming more creative and educational. Like educators, curators are having to think of how to expose more of the collection and share their knowledge of it in new ways. Recognizing that it is impossible for any individual to “know it all” in the age of the Internet (if it ever was), the curator today can have an even greater impact by becoming a curator of information in the public domain, and an expert communicator and interpreter, stimulating interest and helping audiences navigate to the information sources that satisfy their curiosity. Like a node at the center of the distributed network1111 A computer network is said to be distributed “when the computer programming and the data to be worked on are spread out over more than one computer.” See Wikipedia, “Distributed Networking,” accessed August 30, 2009 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Networking. In this sense, the museum, which distributes its content and encounters its public on a wide range of analog and digital platforms, is a networked presence. that the museum has become, the curator is the moderator and facilitator of the conversation about objects and topics proposed by the museum, even across platforms not directly controlled by the museum. Nicholas Poole is CEO of Collections Trust, an independent U.K.-based charity that campaigns for the public right to access and engage with collections. He spoke to the Social History Curators Group, which advocates for improving the representation of social history in museums, in a July 2009 meeting in Leeds, England. He asked: “Given that everyone’s experience and creative output is now spread across an extraordinary range of channels and platforms, how can we hope to curate digital Social History?”1212 Nicholas Poole, “Social Media and Social History,” posted on his blog on Monday, July 13, 2009. Accessed Aug. 29, 2009 at http://openculture.collectionstrustblogs.org.uk/2009/07/13/social-media-social-history/. For the Social History Group, see http://www.shcg.org.uk/. He observes that this kind of challenge is not new to the social historian—nor, I would add, to any subject expert—who has been impacted by the “accelerated pace of social change ever since the invention of the printing press and the inception of the Industrial Revolution.” But looking at the exponential increase in data, publications, and knowledge on all fronts, Poole argues, “the only way we could hope to curate it is by enabling users to become their own curators. Hence a new phrase ‘citizen curators’ joins the ‘citizen digitization’ refrain . . . .” Web 2.0 is “rewriting the social contract,” according to Poole. Its new precepts form the basis of “a kind of New Deal for museums” as “public service broadcasters and service providers.” In the online discussion of revised a set of precepts Poole in order to a that was both more more in the museum our collections. are to the interpretation of We [the will to where We will the platform for the and to and we would like to work our to the The is on In this the role of the curator is of many as in to my is curatorial voice in the age of social is New Media at the Library at He acknowledged that the role of curator even or from the Library at the Museum of Art, with the of “citizen on just this point of expertise. In an to spoke about the role of art curator, but his point for any curatorial and museum visitors to the of curatorial practice through a social media I do not share the that using social media a Curators are the art and the and of It that a shift is to these to control of and access to through “citizen curators” and and the subject expert and a traditional curatorial we to that does not a curatorial from a remote of the to the Powerhouse Museum’s online collection information have in an to that of experts knowledge of any subject may be as as (or even that of in with museum can data as well as the impetus to enhance the of information and content As sources and information online, the acknowledged expert in by and to these of knowledge. even more the curator can help audiences how to research and critically evaluating sources on a much as the curatorial at the Milwaukee Art Museum with American Furniture / In this the curator both an as Buchanan and a for a of knowledge and its on the of and the network that his or her the curator both and editor of Wired and of The the of of and The of a in a at the Smithsonian in 2009 that the about to be as to As an example, described the and his its to his or “The accessed Sept. 2009 at of the of museum work is that of for what we so our is also our the of the of museums have been for and their In the age of information the museum’s ability to of knowledge on specific topics is its and the by all to be to ideas and in many will some will and our the future of and in his blog and the a role for the subject Like that is the for and of each of which will as at as as as but any of which could to be the for the new For the few will be made up of of these models will on amateurs as and of these models will on or or of of these models will on the of these models will one is to what we are now with the of on but over the collection of new that do work give the we and the posted 13, 2009. Accessed Sept. 2009 at principal of and of at the Smithsonian 2.0 conference that perhaps museums are a The Smithsonian 2.0 conference is on its website as to the Smithsonian in the Digital See spoke in a of see Like or they will have to be or as a business in years. the curator will the or a or for his or her research through I may just be that a digital to be a digital I that I hope I the exhibition even I more and more on the digital I would to the of museum collections and their and in their But rather than the we should as does on the of the underlying we is We also to curate the of knowledge now on to the social media and other digital tools that knowledge and and for experts and amateurs As has ever been the case, curators can and the they by that audiences and to our In the new the curator’s will be not just by the of his or her but also by the and of the network that is in active conversation with the curator, the ongoing and future of the The would like to for museums and for my of topic for this

A versatile gel-like system for the treatment of art has been prepared from partially hydrolyzed poly(vinyl acetate), borax, and large fractions of ethanol, isopropyl alcohol, n-propyl alcohol, and acetone. Variables such as the concentrations of the two gelating components, the degree of hydrolysis and molecular weight of the polymer, and the type of liquid gelated were investigated to establish formulations of gels with physical and chemical properties that are best suited for specific applications. The gels were designed to have an elastic character that allows them to conform to the topography of complex surfaces and be removed with ease by being lifted from the surface. Results from fluorescence studies demonstrated that the solvent is constrained within the area of the gel, allowing for localized treatment. Polymer and boron residues were not detected after cleaning tests on acrylic and dammar test paint-outs, and on two oil paintings with degraded surface coatings. The efficacy of the cleaning systems was determined visually. Studies of the materials removed during treatments showed that the gels appear to act by softening the coating surface while typically a pass with a solvent-dampened swab after gel treatment removes the softened coating. Two case studies and notes on other applications of the gels are described; recipes and preparation procedures are included.

This volume brings together papers presented at “The Age of Plastic: Ingenuity + Responsibility,” a Smithsonian symposium hosted by the Museum Conservation Institute on June 7–8, 2012. The event was conceived as a cross-disciplinary exploration of plastic as technological material, cultural phenomenon, preservation challenge, and force on the environment. Writers, scientists, conservators, historians, filmmakers, designers, and policy makers offer researched and first-hand accounts from life in the Plastic Age. Papers are organized to highlight the importance and complexity of plastic material culture through juxtaposition of countervailing positive and negative viewpoints. The volume features observations on innovation in plastic with past and contemporary examples of furniture design, failed experiments with proteinaceous fibers before World War II, the transition of celluloid from ivory simulant to unique identity, the space program, and bioplastics in automobiles. Studies of the rise of food packaging further explore how plastic shapes and is shaped by our culture. Preservation challenges that new, often unstable plastic poses for the cultural heritage community are explored through case studies of novel conservation treatments, research into newdeterioration phenomena, and knowledge transfer. The relationship between plastic and the environment is probed with perspectives on pollution, advantages of plastic to living zoological collections, and recycling. Intended primarily for the cultural heritage community but also relevant to other fields, this volume demonstrates the importance and challenges of documenting the remarkable ongoing evolution of plastic materials that now are integral to the artifact record as markers of achievement and records of the innovation process.

Abstract As we contemplate the future of forest landscapes under changing climate conditions and land‐use demands, there is increasing value in studying historic forest conditions and how these landscapes have changed following past disturbances. Historic landscape paintings are a potential source of data on preindustrial forests with highly detailed, full‐color depictions of overstory and understory environments. They display key details about forest community composition, microhabitat features, and structural complexity from a time well before the advent of color photography. Despite these paintings' potential, their scientific applications have been impeded by questions of validity. How truly accurate are the images portrayed in these paintings? How much of an image is an artist's manipulation of a scene to best illustrate an allegory or romanticized view of nature? Following an established assessment model from historical ecology for evaluating resource validity, we demonstrate how scholarship on art history can be integrated with ecological understanding of forest landscapes to follow this model and address these questions of image veracity in 19th century American art. Further, to illustrate the potential use of these historic images in ecological studies, we present in a case study assessing microhabitat features of 10 different paintings. While this paper explores 19th century landscape art broadly, we focus our art historical review in particular on Asher Durand, a prolific and influential artist associated with the so‐called “Hudson River School” in the mid‐1800s. Durand left clear records about his perspectives on accurately depicting nature, and from a review of images and writings of Durand, we find support for the potential use of many of his paintings and sketches in historic forest ecology research. However, we also identify important caveats regarding potential ecological interpretations from these images. More broadly, because 19th century landscape paintings are not always directly transcriptive, and because regional art cultures differed in the 1800s, we cannot within this paper speak about landscape image veracity across all 19th century landscape art. However, in following established methods in historical ecology and integrating tools from art history research, we show that one can identify accurate historic landscape paintings for application in scientific studies.

X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) and micro-X-ray diffraction ( μ XRD) were used to analyze the composition of pigments on a pastel drawing, Special No. 32 , by Georgia O’Keeffe. XRF analyses showed that, among other pigments present in the drawing, the red, orange, and yellow pigments may possibly be identified with lead- and chromium-based pigments: lead chromates, red and yellow lead oxides, and/or lead carbonates, plus calcium-based pastel fillers, such as whiting or gypsum. XRD examination of a sample removed from a dark mottled area of coral red pastel confirmed that this pigment layer, which is associated with a darkened appearance and high Pb:Cr ratios, matches the red lead oxide, minium (2PbO⋅PbO 2 ).

Climate change has become one of the most significant and fastest growing threats to cultural heritage around the globe. Yet cultural heritage sites and collections also serve as invaluable sources of resilience for communities to address climate change. In March 2020, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Collections Program convened the symposium “Stemming the Tide: Global Strategies for Sustaining Cultural Heritage through Climate Change” to empower cultural heritage authorities, managers, and advocates to pursue more ambitious engagement and collaborative approaches to climate change. Speakers explored six categories of cultural heritage identified by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS): Cultural Landscapes and Historic Urban Landscapes, Archaeological Sites, Built Heritage (Buildings and Structures), Cultural Communities, Intangible Cultural Heritage, and Museums and Collections.

In 2017 and 2018 the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) engaged in long-term conservation projects for two of its most iconic artworks, For SAAM (2007) by Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) and Megatron/Matrix (1995) by Nam June Paik (1932–2006). In both works, underlying technologies were replaced due to failure and obsolescence. Contemporary art conservators have developed methods and ethics for evaluating these fraught decisions. Stakeholders designate work-defining properties to establish an artwork’s identity, and assess treatments and exhibitions based on whether these properties persist. However, an artwork’s identity always has a degree of fluidity and contingency. The culture of the collecting institution and the opinions of those involved influence treatment decisions and the resulting evolution of the artwork and its identity. This paper presents case studies that highlight the creative and authorial roles museum staff play in conserving and exhibiting iterative artworks. Conservators are becoming more comfortable acknowledging the subjective and authorial decisions they make when managing change in artworks. Effective documentation acknowledges these roles and in so doing leaves the door open for future practitioners to reinforce previous decisions or reevaluate them and follow alternative paths.

A non-destructive dry swabbing sampling method was developed and validated to characterize surface exudates on heritage poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) objects that show evidence of degradation. Coupled with non-proximate desorption photoionization high-resolution mass spectrometry (NPDPI-MS), this approach enabled direct untargeted analysis of swabs. The methodology was applied at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington DC, USA) and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (New York, USA), identifying organic compounds such as plasticizers, fire retardants, and lubricants. NPDPI-MS distinguished chemical variations within an art series and revealed differences influenced by age and handling. The efficiency of direct swab analysis was compared to direct object analysis, and the correlation between surface and bulk plasticizer content was investigated. Designed for museum accessibility, this method requires no advanced equipment for sampling while providing comprehensive chemical insights into surface exudates.

Abstract This article presents a descriptive and analytical account of a semester-long partnership between museum educators and high school students piloting the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards Visual Arts Model Cornerstone Assessment. To mentor the students through their task of curating a themed art exhibition of their own work at school, museum educators modelled curatorial strategies, best practices, and lines of questioning that the students later adapted and applied to their own exhibition planning process. The resulting collaboration reveals the deeply authentic, if under-recognized, relationship between curatorial practice and art education practice and offers a compelling case for breaking down traditional barriers between curators and museum educators in order to create a generative space in which to cultivate student curators across multiple disciplines.

This report documents observations and results obtained from a lighting demonstration project conducted under the U.S. Department of Energy GATEWAY Solid-State Lighting (SSL) Technology Demonstration Program at the Smithsonain American Art Museum in Washington, DC. LED Lamp samples were tested in the museum workshop, temporarily installed in a gallery for feedback, and ultimately replaced all traditional incandescent lamps in one gallery of modernist art at the American Art Museum and partially replacing lamps in two galleries at the Musesum's Renwick Gallery. This report describes the selection and testing process, technology challenges, perceptions, economics, energy use, and mixed results of usign LED replacement lamps in art galleries housing national treasures.

Evolving curatorial frameworks for art beyond the mainstream have influenced how conservators approach preservation and degrees of intervention. Unconventional materials and techniques, along with inconsistent or compromised care during the artist's lifetime necessitate artist-specific materials knowledge and a curatorial perspective that considers the artist's historical lack of agency as a factor in preservation strategies.

Review of the exhibition Japanomania in the Nordic Countries, 1875-1918 which opened at the Helsinki Ateneum Museum February 18, 2016. The exhibition examined over 400 works in all media that revealed how the mania for all things Japanese shaped Nordic aesthetics at the turn of the century. The exhibition goes on to Oslo and Copenhagen through 2017, and it has a catalogue published in five separate language editions with the English version being distributed by Yale University Press.

Digital audiovisual workflows are complex. They can hinge on a breadth and depth of knowledge that is difficult to find within a single team or institution. The areas of knowledge called on can range from obscure and obsolete audiovisual carriers, to all the components in a digitization workflow chain, as well as new and evolving community resources and digital competencies for discovering errors during the quality control process. While there are many standardized audiovisual workflows, as this paper illustrates, QC work can be difficult even with a high level of training and experience; and problems, when caught, are often resource-intensive to diagnose and address. This paper details six distinct audiovisual case studies in which different digital preservation obstacles that are difficult to qualify, fully understand, and document are discussed; as well as, when possible, their solutions. They are all unique, but also unexceptional: we expect there are comparable situations, perhaps not-yet discovered or addressed in many audiovisual archives. This paper will underscore difficulties, and guide readers through some of the processes -- both formal and informal -- used to further analyze audiovisual file problems. Ultimately, in addition to helping other staff with similar problems, this paper should emphasize to administrators the special resource needs of audiovisual files and the staff responsible for them.

(2004). Atomic Museums of (Partial) Memory. Journal of Museum Education: Vol. 29, Museums of Memory, pp. 21-25.

This book can be described as an 'oblique memoir'. The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for creative expression. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s). It also includes the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s, Eleanor Rathbone; reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the written word. The book also explains how forced exile persists through generations through a family history. It showcases the differences between English and American cultures. The book focuses on the incidence of cancers caused by exposure to radioactivity in England, and the impact it had on Anglo-American relations.

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Discover Irish art at the National Gallery of Ireland, by Marie Bourke and Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch. Dublin, Ireland: The National Gallery of Ireland, 1999. 253p. ill. ISBN 0903162822. IR£14.95 (pa.). - Volume 25 Issue 3

The Grove dictionary of art online. http://www.groveart.com (September 2000) Annual subscriptions: Public libraries (basedon populations served): begins at $100. - Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon Internationale Künstlerdatenhank (AKL-World Biographical Dictionary of Artists). 9th Edition. Leipzig: K.G. Saur, 2000. 1 CD-ROM with 2 updates. ISBN 3-598-40427-1. 300 for libraries with a subscription to the print set. - Volume 26 Issue 1

The Grove dictionary of art online. http://www.groveart.com (September 2000) Annual subscriptions: Public libraries (based on populations served): begins at $100. - Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon Internationale Künstlerdatenbank (AKL-World Biographical Dictionary of Artists). 9th Edition. Leipzig: K.G. Saur, 2000. 1 CD-ROM with 2 updates. ISBN 3-598-40427-1. 300 for libraries with a subscription to the print set. - Volume 26 Issue 1

This Section of Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences appears in each issue of the Journal and is dedicated to all forms of creative production born of an intimate and individual urge, often secretive, unbound from the conventional art system rules. Through short descriptions of the Outsider art work of prominent artists and new protagonists often hosted in community mental health services, this Section intends to investigate the latest developments of the contemporary art scene, where the distances between the edge and the centre are becoming more and more vague.