Smithsonian.com

“In Plane View: Abstractions of Flight,” a new exhibition at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum that opened March 21, is a collection of 56 large-format photographs by Carolyn Russo that will toy with your perceptions. These hyper close-ups of aerial icons focus on parts rather than the whole aircraft—reminiscent of O’Keefe’s flowers, Warhol’s soup cans and a Technicolor movie musical.

The images are strikingly bizarre with exceptionally vivid colors, providing an open buffet of eye candy that is a sensory experience that cannot be had by looking at aircraft strung from the ceiling. (Above: these are the grooves within the exhaust cone of the North American X-15. The pattern of light and dark streaks were etched into the exhaust cone by the extremely hot gas expelled through it.)

Russo has been a photographer at the Air and Space Museum since 1988 and began working on the project in 2004, armed with her handheld Hasselblad and a background in portrait photography. The aim was to divine the persona of each aircraft, accentuating qualities that the average tourist would not think to uncover.

“We live with these planes,” Russo said of her subjects. “I see them every day. They become beings.”

“In Plane View” can be found on the ground floor of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum until January 2, 2009, and a book of Russo’s work is available from powerHouse books.

(Photo by Carolyn Russo/NASM, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution)

We’ve been keeping an eye on the PandaCam at the Zoo because we heard it was time for a little hanky panky between the pandas. But if anything went on, we missed it.

Should nature not take its proper course, however, the Zoo’s scientists don’t want to waste an opportunity. Female pandas only go into estrus one time a year for just 48 hours.

So yesterday, reproduction scientists Copper Aitken-Palmer, JoGayle Howard, and Pierre Comizzoli (foreground) and zoo veterinarian Carlos Sanchez were part of a large team of experts that performed an artificial insemination this afternoon on Mei Xiang, the Zoo’s female giant panda.

By all reports, if the insemination is successful, Mei Xiang will give birth in the next 90 to 185 days.

(Photograph courtesy of Jessie Cohen / Smithsonian’s National Zoo/March 19, 2008)

The Smithsonian Photography Initiative is calling its new web-based forum “Click! Photography Changes Everything,” a title that begs the question, how so?

The story behind the somewhat haunting photo of two young boys really drove the point home for me. Elijah and Isaiah, orphans in New Mexico, faced a rocky start. At ages 4 and 5, they were about to be institutionalized because their “high-needs” status prevented them from entering into Foster Care. When a photographer from the Heart Gallery, an organization that uses photography to bring awareness to adoption, snapped some photos of them, she couldn’t get any smiles, only fearful and icy stares. But a couple saw the photo at a Roswell, New Mexico, exhibition and was so moved that they adopted the boys. For Elijah and Isaiah, it was the click that changed everything. To Heart Gallery co-founder Diane Granito, it was a “single, but indicative, moment in their lives captured with compassion and skill” that had the strength to change the way families are formed.

Find more art-affirming stories at the Click! website which launched just last Friday. The site featuring nearly 20 essays from people of all disciplines weighing in on how photography affects who we are, where we go, and what we do, is a facet of a decade-long research project, the Smithsonian Photography Initiative, to make the Institution’s collection of more than 13 million images more accessible to the public. Director Merry Foresta says the stories on Click! “are meant to represent an accumulated archive of different viewpoints and different contexts about photography,” adding that the future holds even more promise of “unique points of view.”

Laurie Anderson’s career has ranged far and wide since her jump from avant-garde performance artist to 1980s pop music star. In addition to experimenting with electronic instruments like the talking stick and the tape-bow violin, she’s written the Encyclopedia Britannica entry for “New York” and recently served as NASA’s first artist in residence. Anderson will be giving a free lecture on Andy Warhol (sponsored by the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum) at 4:30 in the McEvoy Auditorium on March 15. I got the chance to catch up with her last week.

You started out in the 1960s and 1970s as an artist and you became a pop hit in the 1980s. How was that transition?

I didn’t know anything about the pop world. I was just an artist in New York and I had made a record that I was distributing by mail order. People would call me up on the phone and say, “Can I get this record?” I would go over to a carton, pick it up and go to the post office with it. I had pressed 1,000 records of something I had done on an NEA grant called O Superman. Then I got a call one afternoon from a guy in Britain who said “I’d like to order some records. I’ll need 40,000 Thursday and 40,000 more on Monday.” So I said, “Right. Okay. I’ll get right back to you.”

I called Warner Brothers and said, “Listen, I need to press a bunch of records, could you help me with it?” And they said, “That’s not how we do things at Warner Brothers Records. What we do is you sign an eight-record deal.”

And I was like, “What?”

So anyway, that’s what I did, because I thought that could be interesting. I tried very hard not to be seduced by that kind of world. I tried to have a lot of fun with it and I think I did. You get out of a car and everyone is screaming, it was just funny for me. They were like, “Can I get your autograph? Oh my god!” and “It’s really you.” For me I felt like an anthropologist.

Anthropologist? You’ve also worked in McDonald’s. Is that how you stay fresh, by trying different things?

I had gotten into kind of a rut with my life as an artist. You know how you make these elaborate plans and you start living them out without really getting into the experience?

I thought “How can I escape this trap of just experiencing what I expect?” I try to jump out of my skin. I normally see the world as an artist first, second as a New Yorker and third as a woman. That’s a perspective that I sometimes would like to escape.

So I put myself in places where I don’ t know what to do, I don’t know what to say, I don’t know how to act. I worked on an Amish farm, a place that had no technology at all. I also worked in McDonald’s. They were all really, really fascinating experiences.

You’re coming down to D.C. next week to give a lecture about Andy Warhol and his “Little Electric Chair” series. Why Warhol?

I feel like we are living in Andy’s world now. It’s the world that he defined in so many ways and his obsessions with fame and violence and ego. You just look around and go, “Wow, he was doing that 30 years ago!”

American culture was going that way and he nailed it. It’s completely fascinating how he came up with those categories and American life became that way.

Why the electric chair?

I think for me it combines a lot of things. One was this idea of tabloid stuff. We don’t allow images of people being electrocuted, for example. Another is the factory image, the multiple stuff, it’s a kind of death factory. People pass through that and it involves technology as well in a way, it’s the power of electricity….

Are you running out of time?

I am running out of time. My assistant is waving his hands, saying “You have to go now or you’ll be dead!”

(Photograph courtesy of SAAM. Saturday’s event is part of the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series, sponsored by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum and the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.)

Ready for another guess-this-picture game? We snapped this mysterious whirligig somewhere Around the Mall at the Smithsonian. Tell us what you think it is.

Is it a propeller on steroids? The world’s coolest water slide? A Frank Gehry gone gonzo?

Check back later, when we reveal what it is.

(Photograph by Scott Stark)

Ever seen a Thunderbirds’ air show and those daring diamond formations, and wondered what it takes to become one of those pilots? And, even more, what it would it take for a woman to join the ranks? The Thunderbirds formed in 1953, but it took 52 years for a woman to fit the mix. Major Nicole Malachowski debuted as the first female Thunderbird in March 2006. So why the gender lag, you ask?

Dorothy Cochrane, curator of the National Air and Space Museum’s aeronautics division, filled museum visitors in Wednesday at a noontime “Ask the Expert” discussion.

At the end of each year, the U.S. Air Force calls for pilots—top guns, basically, who have a minimum of 1,000 hours of flight time—to apply to the Thunderbirds. The current team (not a bunch of generals at the Pentagon) makes the selections, whittling the applicant pool down to 12 semifinalists, who are invited to spend an air-show day with the Thunderbirds. Five finalists interact with everyone from the pilots to the ground crew and take part in several interviews. Ultimately, three new members are ushered in.

“It’s not necessarily who is the best pilot, it’s who’s going to get along. Personality is a huge, huge part of the selection,” says Cochrane. “All of these pilots are top notch.”

Women started flight training in the 1970s, but they were prevented from flying any of the top aircraft. Once the decision was made in the 1990s to let women pilot front-line fighters, females had to work their way through the system. It was just a matter of time before there were female captains and majors qualified to apply for the Thunderbirds, according to Cochrane.

“Sooner or later, someone makes the decision, ‘Let’s have the first woman.’ In some cases, it might just be, ‘Well, somebody’s got to do it. Let us be the first one.’ Or it may just be that someone like Nicole comes along, and they think, ‘She is actually perfect for this, and we’ve never had a woman. Why is that?’”

Major Malachowski’s commitment, credentials and personality made her the one. After graduating fourth in her class at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996, she gained international and semi-combat experience in England, Kosovo and Baghdad. About blazing the way for women, Cochrane says, “She wasn’t really concerned with breaking this glass ceiling. To her, it’s ‘I just want to fly, and I want to fly with the best.’”

Having wrapped up her two-year tour with the Thunderbirds, Malachowski plans to donate her flight gear to the Air and Space Museum. She’ll be speaking at the museum on Thursday, March 27. Find details about the event here.

On Tuesday, I headed over to the weekly sketching session at the American Art Museum, figuring it would give me a chance to brush up on my drawing, something I’ve neglected in the last few years.

About a dozen gathered at the Luce Foundation Center, a three-level storage and study facility with thousands of works of art tucked away in a setting that’s part library, part art gallery.

This week’s session focused on landscapes, and opened with a huddle around a couple of aging sketchbooks by early 20th century painters brought in by Liza Kirwin, a curator at the Archives of American Art. (See some sketchbooks online here)

One was filled with quick pencil drawings by Fairfield Porter suggesting New England landscapes.

The sketches were “very preliminary and spontaneous,” Kirwin explained. “He was trying to get a quick idea of what he’s seeing and maybe he will work it up into a complete painting.”

That’s exactly what visitors were told to do before heading off to sketch landscapes in the collection.

“Imagine you’re using the sketches to create a finished painting. What information would you need to document?” asked Bridget Callahan, an assistant at the Luce Center. “Try to capture the entire composition.”

It sounded easy enough listening to her, but with only an old No. 2 pencil bummed from a coworker and originally pilfered from Omni Hotels, I wasn’t sure how I would do. Some of the half-dozen regulars carried well-worn sketchbooks and sets of artist’s pencils.

Luckily, the group was a mixture of skill levels. Another first-timer confessed she hadn’t sketched in 24 years. And there were pencils, pastels and paper on hand.

I grabbed a stool and plopped down in front of a painting by Thomas Chambers. Its setting looked like a lake in Japan, but the artist actually painted it along the Hudson River.

I focused on the details, trying to get the curve of the dark stone arch and its feathery bushes, the boats and mountains. The rest of the world slipped away as I fell into a meditation.

But when I took a critical look at my drawing, my reverie was destroyed. The more I sketched with my Omni Hotels pencil, the more it turned into a mass of gray only hinting at the colorful painting. The ominous storm clouds were just a mass of chicken scratches. The country estates on the hill, a stack of cardboard boxes.

I moved on to a desert landscape by Tom Lea tinted with the beige and purple of the southwest, but I again ended up with gray mountains and sand. The prickly cactus turned into a pile of donuts sprouting deer antlers.

I switched to colored pencils and tried a pond in New Hampshire, but found I had less control with color. My tree morphed into a giant blob-like insect shaking its fists at the lake. It didn’t matter. I had fun.

When the 45 minutes ran out, the group shared sketches and encouragement. Sketching sessions are held most Tuesdays at the American Art Museum’s Luce Foundation Center from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Next week’s theme is body parts, which should be interesting.

(Images courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Thomas Chambers, Landscape; Tom Lea, Southwest; Abbott Handerson Thayer, Dublin Pond)