Smithsonian Magazine October 2022

“The sculptor needn’t remain a mystery. Kudos to Rubin Eynon.” Croatian Destination “Away to Istria” was a thoughtful delve into a part of our planet I knew little about (September 2022). I am not sure which intrigued me more—Tito’s parrot or the discovery of the Danse Macabre. Liz Dunster | Wilson, North Carolina The Man, The Mystery Your September 2022 cover features a photograph of Gallos, an eight-foot-tall bronze sculpture by an artist you didn’t name. “Gallos” is the Cornish word for “power.” Interestingly, the last words of the article are, “We know this was a center of power [.…] But whose power was it? It’s always going to remain a mystery.” But the sculptor needn’t remain a mystery: kudos to Rubin Eynon. Stephen DeWoody | Winter Park, Florida Finding…

TO SLIP “THE SURLY bonds of Earth,” as World War II aviator and poet John Gillespie Magee Jr. famously described it, is a freedom long aspired to by humankind, uniquely capturing our imagination. One of my favorite displays at the National Air and Space Museum, where I began my Smithsonian career, has always been the Wright Flyer. The humble aircraft and its improbable flight still spark the boy-hood wonder I felt upon seeing it decades ago. On October 14, the west end of the museum reopens to the public, allowing imagination to again take flight. The museum’s unparalleled collections of important aeronautic artifacts will still be familiar. But its redesigned wing containing eight new exhibitions, part of an ongoing renovation, will also transform the way we tell the story of…

THE SEATS ARE SIMPLE benches. The space is small. To stand at the back of the hall is to be only 20 or so feet from the band. The wooden walls are washed out. Even the instruments used by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, founded with the hall in 1961, feel a bit old: It’s been a while since clarinets and tubas were central to popular music. And then, of course, there’s the traditional repertoire, comprising standards that reach back to the first decades of the 20th century, like “Little Liza Jane” and “St. James Infirmary.” Unlike other famous jazz venues that have changed their décor and ethos with the times, Preservation Hall remains the most authentic, with a pure emphasis on the music. In some ways, the antiquity of the…

Iroquois Theater, 413 S. Rampart St. This Black vaudeville house, built in 1911, was one of the city’s first venues to hold jazz concerts, lending artistic legitimacy to a genre then more frequently heard in saloons, where music was mainly a backdrop to boozing and socializing. An adolescent Louis Armstrong won a talent contest here after dipping his face in flour to perform in “whiteface.” Pianist Clarence Williams and singer Edna Landry performed frequently in the theater’s first decade. Today, disused, the building still stands. Perseverance Society Hall, 1644 N. Villere St. Opened in 1880 by the Société de la Perseverance, a benevolent organization of French-speaking Black Americans. The society would hire bands for funerals and dances, and by the turn of the century, the hall had became a music…

EVER SINCE artist Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga learned about the coltan industry in his native Democratic Republic of Congo, he has been obsessed by the contrast between the rare metallic ore’s role as a vital component in the infrastructure of our digital age and the legions of underpaid workers who dig it out of the earth by hand. Collected in a new monograph out this month, Kamuanga Ilunga’s paintings of figures traced with circuitry allude to European portraiture, dystopian science fiction and Congolese sculpture and textiles. But, as the 31-year-old artist says, it was the inner workings of his broken iPhone that inspired him to “tattoo the badges of contemporary technology into the skin of those who procure these materials for others’ profit.” Kamuanga Ilunga’s work explores parallels between Congo’s past—the…

BY 1938, THERE WASN’T a job Florence St. John hadn’t done in the raucous Sheet Metal Department at the Olds Motor Works in Lansing, Michigan, where around 300 workers at 70 or so behemoth machines punched, drilled, welded and riveted Oldsmobile parts. St. John stepped onto the factory floor for the first time in 1928, joining around 30 other women in the over-whelmingly male trade. The 32-year-old mother of three worked elbow-to-elbow with the men, levering heavy presses to bend and cut steel. In the 1930s, managers at the Olds Motor Works, a division of General Motors, treated St. John and other women the same as men in nearly all but one respect: pay. St. John first discovered a pay disparity during games of “check pool”—a form of poker that the…