Tabla de contenidos para October 2022 en Smithsonian Magazine

“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…

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…

Last winter, Andreas Keller decided the time was right to branch out from his day job as a neuroscientist and launch a new art gallery. Not just any gallery, but the country’s first and only commercial space devoted entirely to smell-based art. He rented a defunct barbershop in New York City’s Chinatown and teamed up with an artist named M Dougherty for his inaugural show in February of 2021, drilling a hole in the exterior wall to pipe a piney perfume called “Forest Bath” to the street outside. The fresh evergreen mingled with steamed dumplings and ripe dumpsters and the smoldering papers that Keller’s Chinese neighbors sometimes burned as an offering to their ancestors. “The gallery had always been a fantasy, but the pandemic brought it into focus,” says…

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…

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…

THE FIRE BLED UPWARD from the cellar and swelled to an inferno overnight. Buckets and hoses proved no match for the blaze. A horrified crowd assembled outside Blodget’s Hotel, where the U.S. Patent Office shared space with the Post Office, and the sun rose on December 15, 1836, to find the entirety of the nation’s intellectual property records turned to ash: around 10,000 patents in total—every invention registered with the government since 1790. After the fire, the Patent Office—now the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)—implored inventors to send in their original documentation, to be duplicated. That effort formally ended in 1847, and to this day only around 2,845 of the lost patents have been fully replicated in the agency’s records. But the USPTO has revived the rescue program—and it’s…

Samuel Adams delivered what may count as the most remarkable second act in American life. It was all the more confounding after the first: He was a perfect failure until middle age. He found his footing at 41, when, over a dozen years, he proceeded to answer to Thomas Jefferson’s description of him as “truly the man of the Revolution.” With singular lucidity Adams plucked ideas from the air and pinned them to the page, layering in the moral dimensions, whipping up emotions, seizing and shaping the popular imagination. ON A WET NIGHT IN 1774, when a group of Massachusetts farmers settled in a tavern before the fire and, pipes in hand, discussed what had driven Bostonians mad—reasoning that Parliament might soon begin to tax horses, cows and sheep; wondering what additional…

Q: Why did ants make it all over the Americas while anteaters are only found in South America? Chris Bristol | Grants Pass, Oregon AS SPECIALIZED FEEDERS, anteaters—which include the giant anteater, two species of tamandua, and seven species of silky anteater—must live where ants and termites are superabundant, and nowhere are they more abundant than the tropics. The farther you move away from the tropics, the more ant and termite populations decline, eventually diminishing to the point where they can no longer sustain an anteater. But this does not mean that anteaters haven’t invaded some parts of North America. They can be found in the tropical parts of this continent, in southern and eastern Mexico. The Isthmus of Panama is what separates North and South America, and anteaters live…

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…

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…