Ever wanted to do the Lindy Hop as it was swung at the Savoy Ballroom in the 1930s? To rock your hips through the mambo like dancers at the Palladium Ballroom in the ’50s? To pose as if in a vogue battle of the ’80s? All in a museum? Now’s …
Earlier this month the Whitney Museum of American Art celebrated the opening of an exhibition by the painter Amy Sherald — Michelle Obama’s official portraitist — with a champagne toast over lush arrangements of daffodils and yellow ranunculus. At the Museum of Modern Art, another recent blowout event honored an …
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. “What is your wildest dream for our future?” That is the question written boldly on the 16-by-11-foot blue wall that is featured in “Dreamseeds,” an interactive art and sound installation. Here …
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. Surrounded by a group of 10th graders, Alex Asal, a museum educator at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, read aloud from three school lunch menus. She asked the students to …
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. When Daniel Merritt became chief curator of an art museum at 32, he did not expect his profession to require him — or the public — to put on skis. But …
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. In the Gilded Age, when newly wealthy Americans sought to advertise their social status here and abroad, several of them turned to what had long been a practice of the established …
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. On the campus of Yale University, two art museums housed in landmark modernist buildings — each designed by Louis I. Kahn — sit directly across the street from one another. One, …
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. What’s all that yelling? It’s hard to make out the words, but at the entrance to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture’s new “Give Me Liberty” exhibition, a man’s voice …
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. Daniel Ksepka, the curator of science at the Bruce Museum here, visited Fairbanks, Alaska, in May 2022 for a research project on fossil birds. But Ksepka, a paleontologist by training, found …
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. Back in the 1960s, a prominent Detroit obstetrician had two passions — delivering babies and collecting artifacts that told the African American story. And just as those babies grew up, so …