Smithsonian Magazine June 2021

“James Turrell is obviously a human who is a century ahead of the rest of us.” Science of Motherhood I was fascinated by what was discovered in the bodies and brains of experimental animals and how they reacted (“The Making of a Mom,” May 2021). I guess the maternal instinct goes further than we thought. — Lois Sobel | Chapel Hill, North Carolina Desert Artwork James Turrell is comparable to Nikola Tesla (“The Light Fantastic,” May 2021). He has the ability to hold visions of completed projects in his imagination and knows exactly what processes are needed to finish those endeavors to his standards. He is obviously a human who is at minimum a century ahead of the rest of us in his thinking. — Daniel Durnam | Belgrade, Montana…

AS A CURATOR AT THE National Museum of American History in the mid-1990s, I had the opportunity to lead a team opening an exhibition of Smithsonian musical and historical artifacts just outside Tokyo. Going into this project, I expected that we would learn enormously from our Japanese counterparts about their museums, their history, their strategies. And certainly, I did. What I hadn’t been expecting was that they would also teach me about America. One never sees the United States in the same light after viewing it from afar. Though Japanese and American history look very different, my time in Japan challenged me to grapple with the commonalities across our experiences, and understand my work from a broader international perspective. My career as a historian of Black America was made richer,…

THE ASPIRING PHOTOGRAPHER David Bachrach was still just a teenager in Baltimore when he landed an apprenticeship at Harper’s Weekly. His big break came in November of 1863 when the magazine sent him on assignment to Pennsylvania, where he took one of only three confirmed photographs of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. Because Lincoln spoke for only two minutes or so, Bachrach was unable to prepare his camera fast enough to capture the president delivering his speech. Instead, Bachrach’s photograph shows Lincoln after the address, sitting in a chair on the speaker’s platform in front of a teeming crowd. A year later, the Army dispatched Bachrach to photograph Union prisoners in South Carolina. Some of those photos served as evidence at a court martial for the prison camp commander, who was…

IN SOUTH ASIA in the 15th and 16th centuries, skilled miniature painters packed epic scenes onto canvases the size of a playing card, using brushes made from a single squirrel hair. But by the late 1980s, when Shahzia Sikander was a teenager in Pakistan, the once-celebrated art form had faded into kitsch, tarnished by a colonial period that saw major works divided and sold in the West. “I gravitated to it because I wanted to understand where that stigma comes from,” says Sikander, whose “neo-miniatures” are the subject of a retrospective opening this month at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum. Sikander spent two years learning the technique, which she used to explore modern themes like gender and the legacy of colonial histories. As her work won worldwide acclaim in…

ONE MORNING IN November 1906, a Hopi teenager on the Second Mesa of the Arizona reservation awoke to pandemonium. A U.S. Army officer was calling the villagers together. He said the government had reached the limit of its patience. For two decades, the tribe had refused to send its children to government-sanctioned boarding schools, as directed; now, under military compulsion, every Hopi child had to attend one. Soldiers began rounding up sleepy-eyed children and older kids, too. Mothers wailed, babies cried and fathers vowed to stand up to the Army. But the unarmed Hopi were no match for the soldiers, and their young ones were seized. Tsökahovi Tewanima, a teenager who was 5 feet 4½ inches tall and weighed 110 pounds, was described by one soldier as “thin, emaciated and…

IN 1908, AT A LAB in Niagara Falls, New York, a metallurgist named Auguste Rossi invented a brilliant white pigment that would become almost ubiquitous in human-made stuff and is found today in everything from paint to plastic to pills. The chemical, titanium dioxide, became what color researcher Matthijs de Keijzer calls the “most significant contribution” to an explosion in 20th-century pigment technology, in what some historians refer to as a chromatic revolution, a new look for the world. But archaeologists say that Rossi didn’t get there first. In 2018, researchers in the United States discovered titanium white in 400-plus-year-old ceremonial wooden drinking cups made by the Inca and residing today in various museums. Carved with elaborate geometrical designs, the cups, called qeros, traditionally were not colored. But around the…