The storage space was packed with thousands upon thousands of photographs. Some were at least a century old, imprinted on glass plates. There were others on nitrate film so deteriorated it was at risk of combusting. In a blues and gospel mecca like Memphis, several faces were instantly recognizable: B.B. …
Wealthy collectors who want to be involved with museums typically donate works, write checks and sit on a board of trustees — these are the essential steps that keep art institutions afloat. But Ariel Aisiks — the Argentina-born art patron who now lives on New York’s Upper East Side — …
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. On a recent overcast morning at the Computer History Museum, there was a bike near the entry painted in the colors of the Google logo. These bikes allow employees to navigate …
Jeff Bridges taught her how to drive in his Volkswagen bus. Steven Spielberg refused to flirt with her. She successfully talked the actor Rip Torn out of assaulting the director Nicolas Roeg on a movie set. While lying on a beach in Mexico with the painter Ed Ruscha, she was …
An arrangement of dried flowers pressed between sheets of plastic, the name “Quintana” written in a child’s neat lettering at the top. A yellow Post-it with a poem written in cursive: “My mom is not a sigh/She does not eat pie/Maybe she can fly.” A pocket-size notebook of handmade paper …
Memories fade. Documentation disappears. Scenes vanish. When you’re busy creating a world, you don’t always think about how to preserve it for history. So old fliers and magazines get brittle and crumble, photos get lost, publications go out of business and websites get deleted. It falls to archivists — sometimes …
The archives of The New Yorker, housed at the New York Public Library, consist of more than 2,500 boxes of manuscripts, letters, page proofs, cartoons, art, photographs and memos. They are studded with the celebrated names — E.B. White, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Rachel Carson — that filled this most …
When Ruth Westheimer died last July at 96, she was celebrated as a pioneering sex therapist, cultural gadfly and consummate Manhattanite — described once as a 4-foot-7 cross between Minnie Mouse and Henry Kissinger, to use a much-repeated description, who changed the way we talk about our most intimate lives. …