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Two Violinists (1938-39) by David Park

Friday, January 30: A Scattering of Pearls: Architecture of the Gold Road and the Mali-Spain Diaspora

After completing a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, Mansa Musa, emperor of Mali, returned with architect Al-Saheli. With Mansa’s support, Al-Saheli constructed palaces and mosques—notably the Djingareyber Mosque which was constructed entirely of organic materials in 1327 and still stands—transforming Timbuktu into a renowned center of Islamic study. Historian Suzanne Preston Bier will offer her insights on this business relationship that resulted in stunning works of sub-Saharan architecture. Free. African Art Museum, 12 Noon.

Saturday, January 31: Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural Ball

Show of hands: how many of you out there didn’t have enough disposable income to attend one of those high-falootin’ inaugural balls here in DC? Uh huh, thought so. However, Abraham Lincoln’s opulent second inaugural ball is being dutifully recreated for you by the Victorian Dance Ensemble at the National Portrait Gallery. Free. National Portrait Gallery, 12:00 PM, 2:00 PM, 4:00 PM.

Sunday, February 1: Axlerod Quartet

The Axlerod Quartet—Marc Destrubé and Marilyn McDonald (violins), James Dunham (viola) and Kenneth Slowik (violoncello)—has a string of lovely tunes to play for you this evening at the Renwick Gallery’s Grand Salon. The evening’s musical program is: Mozart’s Quartet in B-flat Major; Mendelssohn’s Quartet in F Minor, Op. 80; and Beethoven’s Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 74 (“The Harp”). Tickets are required. Rates are: $31 general admission; $25 Resident Associate Program Members; $21 senior Resident Associate Members. Tickets may be purchased online here. Renwick Gallery, 7:30 PM.*

*There will be a pre-concert lecture by Smithsonian Chamber Music Society director Kenneth Slowik beginning at 6:30 PM.

Hirshhorn After Hours, photo by Chris Rossi

Lately, D.C.’s cool factor has been under scrutiny. Apparently, the nation’s capital is hip only now that Obama is in the White House, although there are disbelievers. And I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that some probably think the Smithsonian museum complex is—dare I say it?—uncool.

I will concede that Obama is certainly loosening up this buttoned-up city. (People attended inaugural balls in blazers and skinny jeans, and unlike George W., Obama doesn’t require jackets in the Oval Office.) But the Smithsonian isn’t so stuffy either, and even pre-Obama she’s had much more to offer than soporific lectures. The bookish geek has been letting her hair down. She’s cool, gosh darn it.

But here’s five happenings registering on our cool-o-meter. You be the judge. (And don’t dock the Smithsonian any cool points for my using the word “cool-o-meter.” It’s not my coolness that’s up for debate.)

1. Though we’re on government payroll, we’re not all clocking out at 5 and heading for the suburbs. There is a Smithsonian nightlife. Hirshhorn’s “After Hours” lights up Friday nights with live music, a DJ, dancing, a bar and gallery tours. The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, in D.C.’s Chinatown neighborhood, hosts Take Five!, a free Happy Hour with live jazz, every third Thursday. And the Smithsonian’s Reynolds Center played host to Al Gore’s Green Ball during the inauguration. Melissa Etheridge, Maroon 5 and John Legend, among others performed. (John Legend is the definition of cool.) The Smithsonian Resident Associates offer fancy dinners for foodies and performances like the one this past fall by Chicago’s Second City improv group, of which Tina Fey and Steve Carell are alum. The National Zoo has After Hours for young professionals, and once you get past the naming scheme for the events (Woo at the Zoo, Grapes with the Apes and Brew at the Zoo), they’re pretty cool, too.

2. The National Portrait Gallery is most definitely cool. Last year, it hosted an edgy exhibition called “Recognize! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture,” that included commissioned graffiti murals that hung outside the museum. And now, among its new arrivals, is the iconic Obama portrait by bad-boy (he’s been arrested some 14 times) street artist Shepard Fairey.

3. The Smithsonian knows how to take a joke, or at least it’s learning. When Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert lobbied on-air for his portrait to be included among the national treasures at the National Museum of American History, the museum’s director Brent Glass played straight man. But the National Portrait Gallery’s former director Marc Pachter, who was the second to hear Colbert’s plea, deserves some props.

He played hacky sack with Colbert in a tight gallery space and temporarily hung his portrait in the entryway to the bathrooms just outside the hall of America’s Presidents. Glass redeemed himself when he reconsidered, as well. The portrait now hangs in the American History museum, next to Dumbo the flying elephant. Word on the street is that Colbert is pitting his portrait against Fairey’s Obama in a face off. He has asked the National Portrait Gallery to calculate whether Fairey’s is more popular than his, based on visitation numbers.

4. The Smithsonian’s three IMAX theaters (at Natural History, Air and Space and Air and Space’s Udvar-Hazy Center) aren’t all 3-D dinosaurs and deep sea, though those are neat. They show Hollywood fare too. The Natural History and Udvar-Hazy theaters have re-released The Dark Knight. Cool, huh? Check it out before the Oscars.

5. And as for the lack of celebrities in town, the National Portrait Gallery’s “Portraiture Now” exhibition sort of makes up for it with Martin Schoeller’s close-ups of Angelina Jolie and Jack Nicholson. Plus, the Smithsonian has its own celebrities, even if they are a bit obscure. Richard Burgess, of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and Smithsonian Global Sound, invented the electric drum and starred in the first ever MTV music video “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles. So there.

President Obama’s office isn’t the only place you can grow orchids. Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum has turned its thermostat up for a special exhibition that highlights the evolution of these beautiful plants. “Orchids Through Darwin’s Eyes,” displays more than 300 species of orchids in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publication of “On the Origin of Species” and Darwin’s 200th birthday. The show runs through April 26, 2009.

“Every single one of these orchids has a story behind them,” says Smithsonian orchid collections manager Tom Mirenda in a video playing at the exhibit. That story lies in each species’ modified petal, which hangs near the center of the flower and is responsible for drawing in pollinators.

Orchids are the great seducers of the animal kingdom. They can resemble female butterflies, drawing in unsuspecting males who attempt to mate with the plant. In the case of the bucket orchids, its strong scent attracts bees that then slip into its pollen-filled bucket.

Darwin was fascinated by these relationships and recorded his orchid observations throughout his travels, helping him formulate his theories of natural selection. In the exhibition, you can see why Darwin was drawn to these plants as you stand and ponder the evolution of beauty.

Thicker Than Water by Emeline Prince

Coastal America’s Ocean Art Contest promotes awareness about the integral role the ocean and its inhabitants play in our daily lives through works of art.

Aspiring artists—even kindergarteners—sent in their works and the winning entries—selected by an all-star panel of judges including ocean explorer Jean Michel Cousteau and cartoonist Jim Toomey—are currently on display at the National Museum of Natural History.

And let’s face it: the Smithsonian makes for an awesome refrigerator on which to hang someone’s work.

Category 5—the collegiate competition level—grand prize winner is Emeline Prince. A student at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a pre-med/fine arts dual major, she drew inspiration from a chemistry lecture about horseshoe crabs.

“I was really excited, of course,” Prince says of when she first heard her canvas was a grand prize winner. “I just thought ‘Wow, this is such a great opportunity,’ which then was followed by ‘Oh my goodness, I’ve peaked in my 20s.’”

Her winning canvas, Thicker than Water, contemplates how the crabs are invaluable to human health: a clotting agent in the crab’s blood is used in the medical community to detect bacteria in human blood. The yin-yang placement of the two crabs atop a blue background (the color of the crab’s blood) is juxtaposed against the red (the color of our own) visually communicates the idea that we are interconnected with these seafaring creatures. “I haven’t even seen a horseshoe crab in person—and I love them now,” Prince says of her work. “But I had no idea of their importance in medical practices or in the ecosystem until I learned a little tidbit about them. So I’m hoping someone takes a tidbit from my artwork and then explores other things.”

The Coastal America Ocean Art Contest will be on display at the National Museum of Natural History until March 29, 2009.

A 2008 campaign event. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia

Barack Obama banner. Courtesy of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Since Election Day, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), to open in 2015 on the National Mall, has been busily snatching up Obama campaign memorabilia—including most of the objects in a Falls Church, Virginia campaign office—for a future Obama exhibition. We got the scoop from the museum’s chief curator Jacquelyn Serwer.

Why the Falls Church campaign office?

That office was very instrumental in delivering the state to Obama. They had such a diversity of volunteers. We saw grandmothers and grandfathers, and very young people. They had some teenagers who would be dropped off by their parents to come in and do phoning, especially some of the phoning that was done in a variety of languages. It was very impressive.

We wanted to have the contents of a real campaign office because we are thinking that we may want to recreate an office. What we did was to take as much of the contents of the office as we could—banners, homemade signs, scheduling boards, bulletin boards, the diversity materials. They had a room where people would come to make phone calls in ten languages. We took the furniture, but also the canvassing and phoning notebooks.

And it has been your goal to collect objects from campaign offices in other cities around the country, right?

We’ve got the Obama message wall that was up on the Mall between November 5 and 7; people were invited to make their comments. We have a really terrific couple of hand painted banners from Columbia, Missouri. We have a mural sign from Grand Junction, Colorado. It says “Hope for Theater and the Arts,” and it was painted by a local artist in conjunction with the campaign. We got a collection of campaign buttons from a campaign office in Philadelphia. We’ve gotten stuff from Missouri, . . . Colorado, . . .Alaska, and it’s still coming in. Part of the strategic underpinning of the campaign was that they would campaign everywhere, which is not always the case. So we really want to have materials from all over to give it that national character.

What’s the plan from here?

We think we are close to having the kind of material and as much material as we would need to recreate in some authentic way what those campaign offices were like. Whether we’ll have a preview of that in our exhibition space in the American History museum before we have our building or not is kind of up in the air. We get calls almost every day about something or other, and we’re being very careful to respond and hopefully acquire more material that will make our resources for an Obama exhibition that much more exciting.