OEC employees have been hard at work designing and building new officer desks for the entrances to the Smithsonian Castle. OEC exhibit designers Bart McGarry and Lynn Kawaratani interviewed the security officers, who are currently stationed at tables, to figure out how the new desks could best meet their ergonomic and functional needs. McGarry and …
Interview with Howard Clemenko, OEC Mountmaker
Q: Can you describe the first things you consider when making a mount? A: Well, the first thing we say is, “Oh, I can’t do it!” (laughs) No, the first thing we need to know is whether the object we’re mounting is a prop or an artifact. An artifact is an object that is or …
Framing the Dance
The spirit of dance is a difficult thing to capture on film, but photographer Rose Eichenbaum has successfully undertaken that challenge in The Dancer Within, a new traveling exhibit produced by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES). The exhibition’s first stop will be at the Ypsilanti District Library in Ypsilanti, Michigan, beginning in April …
Sunfish Joins the Ranks
The third sea creature to be featured in our series on the National Museum of Natural History’s Ocean Hall’s big models, the Mola mola (ocean sunfish) has been completed and is ready to be put on show. This life-size model measures an impressive height of six feet from fin to fin. Instead of sculpting a …
Oarfish Coming to Life
For the last six months, OEC modelmaker Carolyn Thome has been hard at work creating the model of a ten-foot-long Regalecus glesne (oarfish), an ocean-dwelling creature at times mistakenly thought to be a sea monster by the rare few who see one in nature. This is one of the four life-size models that will be …
OEC Helps with Kisses
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the Archives of American Art (AAA) is installing the exhibition A Thousand Kisses: Love Letters from the Archives of American Art, located in the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery in the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, and will run through May 30, 2008. A Thousand Kisses, …
Giant Crab Nearly Complete
In March 2007, we ran a story about how we acquired a Giant Japanese spider crab to make a life-sized reproduction for the National Museum of Natural History’s Ocean Hall, which opens in September 2008. Since then, OEC modelmaker Vincent Rossi has been hard at work. His first step in creating the model was setting …
OEC blog introduces video!
We finally got ourselves set up on YouTube so that we can post videos of our work from time to time. Here’s one from June that relates to our last post.
New Technologies Bring Old Bones to Life
This summer OEC’s Model Shop began a collaboration that uses cutting-edge technology to learn about early European settlers at Jamestown, Virginia, 400 years ago. Douglas Owsley, curator and department head of the Division of Physical Anthropology in the National Museum of Natural History’s Department of Anthropology leads a research team studying Colonial-era skeletons from sites …
Collaborative Partnership
Every four months, the Office of Exhibits Central and the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL) collaborate to share the rich diversity of the Libraries’ collections with visitors at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). The written and illustrated collections of the Libraries combined with artifacts and specimens give Smithsonian scholars a more complete picture of …