Museum of the Confederacy opening Gettysburg show

• 

  May 1, 2013: A book of Confederate Brigadier General Lewis A. Armistead's brigade records a list of casualties for the regiment for the battle of Gettysburg in a work room at the museum in Richmond, Va.The Associated Press

• 

  May 1, 2013: Senior curator for the Museum of the Confederacy, Robert Hancock, holds the sword carries by Confederate Brigadier General Lewis A. Armistead during the Battle of Gettysburg.The Associated Press

• 

  The Confederate flag of the 7th Virginia Infantry Army of Northern Virginia Obverse captured at the Battle of Gettysburg, Pa.,, in July 1863 by the 82nd New York Infantry.The Associated Press

• 

  May 1, 2013: The bible belonging to Confederate soldier C. Robey, who was wounded on the third day of Gettysburg battle, is prepared for display in a work room at the museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va.The Associated Press

Next Slide Previous Slide

RICHMOND, Va. –  Among the swords, the wrenching letters home and the haunting photographs in the Museum of the Confederacy's new exhibit on Gettysburg, few artifacts embody the ferocious battle more than the eight battle flags recovered from the bloodied fields where Pickett's Charge was fought.

The men who carried them were first in the line of fire, and the flag was coveted by the enemy. If the color bearer fell, it was expected another soldier would pick it up. For the 7th Virginia Infantry alone, nine men were lost at Gettysburg holding the St. Andrew's Cross.

"Capturing the flag was a pretty big deal, or losing your flag was a bigger deal," said Robert Hancock, senior curator at the Richmond museum. "Color bearers made a nice target because they were bearing the big red flag. You did not want to let that flag go."

The flags, among more than 500 in the museum's extensive collection, are the centerpiece of "Gettysburg: They walked through blood," which just opened and runs through September to mark the 150th year since the Battle of Gettysburg. The exhibit focuses on Gen. George Pickett's Virginia Division and the doomed charge on Union Maj. George G. Meade's union positions on Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863.

While the battle forever will be known as Pickett's Charge, it was ordered by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Pickett was one of three generals who led the assault under Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, the charge's commander.

All eight battle flags are from Pickett's Division and the swords of his three brigade commanders — Gens. Lewis Armistead, James Kemper and Richard Garnett — are part of the exhibit.

The battle involved more than 12,000 Confederate soldiers who attempted to advance over fields for three quarters of a mile amid unrelenting fire from Union forces. More than half of the South's soldiers were killed or injured in a battle that forever bruised the psyche of the South.

The exhibit offers Civil War buffs plenty to see, including a large map detailing the battle, but Hancock said the show is also intended to humanize this chapter of history.

"We try to get the audience to connect a little bit more with the individuals and what happened to them later on," he said. "That's one reason we put the photographs in, so you can see a face, attach a face to an object."

There is a photo of Edward Estes, along with a letter addressed "Dear Sis." He wrote of the carnage: "God forbid that I should ever see another such bloody field." Of Pickett, the Pittsylvania County man wrote to his sister in Maryland, "When he came out and saw how few of us were left he wept like a child, & said he wished they of killed him too."

Soldier C. Robey's Bible took a bullet during the battle, and the hole through its pages is proof of his good fortune. He took two other shots, in his arm and leg, and survived.

A letter from a Union surgeon written to the family of a Confederate soldier said he had "suffered considerable pain, but wore it with fortitude and patience I have never seen equaled." He also told the soldier's family where he was buried.

The exhibit also features a photograph of Thomas Owens, who died nine days after the battle, a watercolor, revolvers and Armistead's book, which included casualty figures.

The museum, which is located next to the former Confederate White House in the city's medical district, prides itself on knowing the origin of its collections. Much of it is from family members, handed down through generations.

The flags followed a different path to the museum.

Any flag captured during the war was to be returned to the U.S. War Department. They were so coveted, Hancock said, a soldier who turned one in was up for a Congressional Medal of Honor and a furlough. In 1905, Congress decreed that all the flags be returned to the states. All the Virginia Flags went to the museum.

The flags, which are made of wool, will be framed for the exhibit. They are, Hancock said, "the biggest and most colorful objects of the show," which is fitting.

"During the battle, they were figuratively and literally the centerpiece there too," he said. "The flag was important as a rallying point."

___

Steve Szkotak can be reached on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sszkotakap .

___

Online:

The Museum of the Confederacy: http://www.moc.org/

View the original article here

Mamma Mia!: ABBA The Museum opens in Stockholm

• 

  May 6, 2013: Swedish music group ABBA memorabilia seen during a press preview of 'ABBA The Museum' at the Swedish Music Hall of Fame in Stockholm, Sweden.AP

• 

  Posters and photos of Swedish music group ABBA at the new museum.AP

• 

  Monday May 6, 2013: Bjorn Ulvaeus, former member of the Swedish music group ABBA, is photographed during a press preview of 'ABBA The Museum' at the Swedish Music Hall of Fame in Stockholm, Sweden.AP

Next Slide Previous Slide

STOCKHOLM –  You can thank ABBA for the music. And so much more.

A museum devoted to the pop superstars opening in Stockholm on Tuesday will celebrate the band's long list of hits. But it will also show off paraphernalia, including the helicopter featured on the cover of its "Arrival" album, a star-shaped guitar and dozens of glitzy costumes the Swedish band wore at the height of its 1970s fame.

Some gear is definitely not on show. With a smirk on his face, band member Bjorn Ulvaeus says certain items are "mysteriously ... forever lost," conceding only that among them are "embarrassing" tight costumes he wore when he was "slightly overweight." He declined to say more on the matter.

Some 40 sets of the trademark shiny flares, platform boots and knitted hats are on display in the museum. But visitors can also see digital images of what they would look like in costumes, record music videos and sing such hits as "Dancing Queen" and "Mamma Mia" on a stage next to hologram images of the band members. A telephone also has been placed in a corner and ABBA members have promised to "Ring, Ring" and speak to visitors occasionally.

But the museum also shows a less glamorous, more everyday side of the history of a band that has sold 400 million records and consistently topped the charts in the decade after winning the 1974Eurovision Song Contest with "Waterloo." The band -- made up of Ulvaeus, Anni-Frid Lyngstad,Benny Andersson and Agnetha Faltskog -- started out as two married couples, and continued performing after their divorces, before eventually drifting apart in the early 1980s.

The collection includes models of the band's kitchen, a cottage where they used to compose their songs and the small, rustic park venues Bjorn and Benny played when they first met in the 1960s. Visitors can listen to the band members' recollections and one section is dedicated to the breakup and the story of the divorces.

"It (touches) on those things as well because we think they are important in telling the story," Ulveaus said.

The museum also includes a Swedish Music Hall of Fame, detailing other Swedish artists.

It was a long time coming, eagerly anticipated by fans and visitors to the Swedish capital. Ulvaeus said they needed the time to reflect on their careers. "You need some distance, you need perspective to be able to tell a story like that and I guess you can say that we have perspective now, 30 years on," he told reporters.

Outside the newly built wooden museum scores of international ABBA fans gathered Monday, singing the band's songs and hoping to get a glimpse of their idols arriving for a gala dinner. All were expected except Faltskog, who is currently promoting her comeback album "A'' in Britain.

Nikita Stolyarov, a 21-year-old student from Russia said he got a glimpse of Lyngstad on Sunday when she came by for an early view of the museum.

"It was so exciting, I can't describe my feelings," he said.

View the original article here

SD museum adds Elvis' guitar to vast collection

VERMILLION, S.D. –  A 16th-century Amati violoncello displayed in the National Music Museum has long been nicknamed "The King," but the ghost of a legendary rock 'n' roller has arrived in South Dakota to reclaim his regal moniker.

A slightly smashed acoustic guitar played by Elvis Presley on his final tour in 1977 now greets visitors in front of the museum's main galleries. The Martin D-35 was tossed aside by "The King" during a St. Petersburg, Fla., concert after suffering a broken strap and string, said Robert Johnson, a Memphis-based guitarist who donated the item.

"He broke the strap and at the same time he broke a string," said Johnson, noting Presley's frustration. "He tosses it straight up in the air and it just comes down."

Johnson, who played with singer Isaac Hayes and the band John Entwistle's Ox in the 1970s, donated the Elvis guitar and four other celebrity items to the National Music Museum, which is tucked away in an old Carnegie library building on the University of South Dakota campus. The museum's trustees also purchased Johnson's 1967 Gibson Explorer Korina wood guitar, formerly owned by Entwistle, who's best known as a member of The Who, for $250,000.

Johnson, a longtime collector, also donated a Chet Atkins hollow body guitar given to country pianist Floyd Cramer and later played by Jerry Lee Lewis and Mickey Gilley, a 1966 custom Grammer guitar made for Johnny Cash, a 1961 Kay Value Leader guitar signed by blues legend Muddy Waters and one of Bob Dylan's Hohner Marine Band harmonicas.

"These instruments probably make the biggest splash of any celebrity things that we've had before," said museum director Cleveland Johnson. "We have some nice things, but this is a degree of magnitude higher."

Cleveland Johnson, who is not related to Robert Johnson, took over as director in November after the retirement of Andre Larson, who'd been at the helm since it was established in 1973. The museum's holdings grew out of a private collection owned by Larson's father, Arne B. Larson, who continually added items while serving as a public school music director.

Robert Johnson said he owns some 600 guitars and another 2,000 to 3,000 artifacts, so he began discussions with Andre Larsen in 2010 to get involved with the museum.

"I was trying to find a place to hoard the rest of my stuff so it could be in place," said Johnson, 61. "It gets to be an overwhelming, oppressive burden to keep up with all this stuff."

The museum's 800 or so instruments on public display are the superstars of a broader collection of more than 15,000 pianos, harpsichords, guitars, horns, drums and other musical items. It includes a rare Stradivarius violin with its original neck, saxophones built by inventor Adolphe Sax, and the earliest French grand piano known to survive, an ornate green and gold instrument built by Louis Bas in Villeneuve les Avignon in 1781.

Cleveland Johnson said it has always been easy to drop names like Stradivari and Amati (whose centuries-old violins are considered the finest ever made) when he talks to people in classical music circles, but the new items will help the museum reach a different demographic.

"The motorcycle guys rolling across the state on their way to Sturgis, this would be a nice detour," he said. "Or a bus tour going from Sioux Falls to Memphis or down to Branson, this would be a perfect stop off on the way."

A $15 million expansion plan calls for tripling its 23,000 square feet of gallery space, improving the entrance and revamping the vast archives where music scholars can peruse the thousands of instruments and documents not on public display. The limited space has not only prevented instruments from getting their proper display, but also has hampered curators' efforts to find creative and hands-on ways to program and teach visitors and school groups.

The plan recently earned a federal seal of approval with the awarding of a $500,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, whose chairman Jim Leach called the facility "a national treasure."

Cleveland Johnson said the museum is shifting its focus from acquisitions to developing programs to get the attraction better known around the country.

"I'm tired of being the best-kept secret," he said. "I'm over that. I'm ready to be the best-known musical instrument museum and not the best- kept secret.

"These instruments will take us in that direction, will take the veil off, I hope, for much of the American public."

___

Online:

National Music Museum at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, S.D.: http://orgs.usd.edu/nmm/

___

Reach Dirk Lammers on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/ddlammers

View the original article here

Taking the Kids -- how a museum exhibit is changing lives in Los Angeles

• 

  Touch the tires of a NASA space shuttle.Leroy Hamilton

• 

  Space potty exhibit, California Science Center.Leroy Hamilton

• 

  The Endeavour.Leroy Hamilton

• 

  The Mercury 3: Richard Hercules, Taylor Semaganda and Keilyn Wells â future astronauts discussing the Endeavour missions.Amy Davis

Next Slide Previous Slide

Richard Hercules, 10, lives in L.A.'s inner-city and has never been on an airplane, but that hasn't stopped him from dreaming of becoming an astronaut when he grows up.

He was moved to tears when he saw the Space Shuttle Endeavour fly over his school on its way to its new home at the California Science Center and even more excited when he could walk around the gargantuan space craft -- 122 feet long -- at the museum, touching tires that flew in space, peering up at the tiles crucial to re-entry, inspecting a space potty and galley. (Tortillas, it turns out, are the perfect space food because there were no crumbs to fly around in the gravity-less environment.)

"When I grow up and have my own kids, I can show them the Endeavour and tell them my story about when I first saw it," he said.

"When I saw the Endeavour up close," added Taylor, Richard's classmate at Century Park Elementary School, "I realized that one day I could travel to space."

New museum exhibits often foster excitement and increase tourism and, since it opened last fall, "The Space Shuttle Endeavour Exhibition" has done both in spades. (Did I mention there is no entrance fee to the wonderful hands-on museum, though you can pay $2 for a timed entrance to Endeavour?) But besides garnering excitement and enthusiasm, this exhibit has the potential to change children's lives.

"The shuttle coming here opened a world of possibilities for these kids, many of whom are the children of immigrants," explained Amy Davis, Taylor and Richard's fifth-grade teacher. Suddenly, they saw the possibilities of a career in math, science, technology and engineering. "It was so hard for them to grasp from a textbook," said Davis. "Seeing the shuttle in front of them makes all the difference."

The children's enthusiasm and engagement spurred Davis to thank the Science Center in a letter. "Thank you from the bottom of my heart for investing time and money so a small, 10-year-old, inner-city child could see that dreams can come true and for giving him hope in his future," she wrote. That missive, in turn, inspired the museum to feature the Century Park fifth graders' Endeavour projects in their shuttle exhibit.

An astronaut raised in California came to speak to the children at school. And now, four of Davis' students, including Richard and Taylor, have been offered scholarships to a week at Space Camp this summer in Huntsville, Ala. (Davis is working on sponsors to cover the kids' flights.) Keep in mind that these are kids who haven't been to camp, who typically don't have the opportunity to go on family vacations. "I'm most excited about living like an astronaut," Richard said.

The Endeavour, which was the doomed space shuttle Challenger's replacement and the only shuttle to be named by schoolchildren, arrived with great fanfare at the Science Center on Oct. 31, carried on the back of a specially equipped Boeing 747 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and paraded through the heart of urban Los Angeles as 1.5 million people turned out to watch and cheer.

The other three shuttles are on public display on the East Coast -- The Enterprise at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum Complex in New York, the Discovery at the National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., and the Atlantis in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center. (The Enterprise was a prototype that never actually went into space like the others.)

"For 30 years (19 years in the case of the Endeavour) humans crossed the threshold from being tentative about space exploration with long periods of time during which there were no humans in space to an era of permanent human presence in space (at the International Space Center)," said Dr. Kenneth Phillips, curator for Aerospace Science at the California Science Center.

"We hope that visitors will appreciate the role of the space shuttle program in transforming the human approach to spaceflight and human thinking about what is possible," he added.

That's certainly the case for one group of inner-city kids now thinking differently about their own futures.

In the last six months, more than 1 million people, including thousands of kids, have turned out to see Endeavour at the Science Center -- remarkable when you consider that until now, the Science Center's annual attendance was 1.6 million, observed William Harris, the museum's senior vice president of development. Harris escorted me around the Space Shuttle Endeavour Exhibition as excited kids on field trips gawked and chattered as they checked out spacesuits, a moon rock, earlier space capsules and articles astronauts carried with them in space (a small Slinky, beads blessed by the Dali Lama, a New York Giants cap). They also inspected the control room that monitored the first minutes of every shuttle launch from nearby Canoga Park, Calif., learning that all of the orbiters were built locally.

When the permanent home for the shuttle is completed in 2017, visitors will be able to observe it upright -- and even slide down a 50-foot slide that will simulate how it would feel to land.

"Its size is the coolest thing ever," said 14-year-old Samantha, a member of the Science Center's Curator Kids Club, a group created for kids who live in the underserved communities around the museum. "You can compare how small you are next to it!"

The shuttle, said Harris, is single-handedly turning the California Science Center in L.A.'s Exposition Park into a must-see attraction for those visiting Los Angeles and spurring more people to visit Exposition Park and the neighboring L.A. County Natural History Museum with its amazing dinosaur exhibits.

"Be prepared to be amazed," said 11-year-old Oracio, also a young curator.

I was.

Eileen Ogintz is a syndicated columnist and writes about family travel on her Taking the Kids blog, and is the author of the new series of Kid’s Guide to NYC, Orlando and the just released Washington, DC  from Globe Pequot Press. 

Related Stories

Taking the kids to the Caribbean in summer

Taking the kids: food is part of the adventure at some hotels

Related Opinion

Nine ways to get your child involved in DIY projects this summer

View the original article here

Met art museum sued for not telling visitors it's free

A trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a staple for any New York City tourist. The museum, known locally as "The Met," is one of the largest and most celebrated art museums in the world. And, it’s free. That’s right, the museum has no entrance fee, only a “recommended” $25 suggested donation.

A lawsuit filed on Tuesday by two Czech tourists and a member of the museum will take the Met to task for misleading its 6 million annual visitors into believing there is an admission fee.  

"There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that, as reflected in the complaint filed today, No. 1, an overwhelming majority of people who visit the museum are completely fooled into believing that they are required to pay the museum's admission fees; and No. 2, museum officials know all about it," Michael Hiller, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, told Reuters.

The museum maintains a rent-free lease with the city, meaning New York considers the historic institution public space. The Met is required to open its doors to the public at no fee several days a week, yet has permission to ask for suggested donations.  

The suit claims that the museum “has misled, and regularly misleads, members of the general public to believe, on all days of the week during times when the MMA is open, that they are required to pay the Admission Fees in order to enter Museum Exhibition Halls.”

Visitors may be misled by the signage in the museum’s entrance. Placards above the admissions desk feature the word "recommended" in small letters, while the word "admissions" is in larger, bold type. The lawsuit asks for an injunction and damages for every museum visitor who, like the plaintiffs, paid an admission fee with a credit card.

View the original article here

Checking out nudes in the nude at Austrian museum

VIENNA –  These museum goers didn't just leave their coats at the coat check. They handed over their shirts, trousers and underwear.

Everything, in fact, except their shoes and socks. After all, the stone floor can get chilly when you're touring an art exhibit in the nude, which was what more than 60 art lovers did in a special after-hours showing at Vienna's prestigious Leopold museum.

For many, the tour of "Nude Men from 1800 to Today" — an exhibit of 300 paintings, photographs, drawings and sculptures focused on the bare male — was a goose-bump-raising instance of life imitating art.

"I can't say I'm sweating," said office worker Herbert Korvas as he stood waiting in the atrium with other young men, wearing only socks, sneakers and a smile. Despite the cold, he said he was drawn to the idea of naked museum viewing "because it was something different."

But after a while it really wasn't. With no other viewers around, nude quickly became the new normal as the visitors quickly gathered around a — dressed — exhibition guide and moved slowly from one art work to the next, listening intently to their history.

And they weren't the first visitors to get naked either, despite the hoopla around the event that drew dozens of reporters and camera teams from Austria and elsewhere.

A man had already stripped at the exhibition of pictures and sculptures in November, calmly sauntering through the exhibition and dressing again only after a security guard asked him to do so. That act made news — and sparked demand for Monday's all-nude showing, said museum spokesman Klaus Pokorny.

"We got requests from all over the world from people who were inspired by the exhibition ... who asked us, 'Can we visit the exhibition naked?'" he said.

On Monday, interest was definitely skewed along gender lines. Irina Wolf smiled as she looked around at the mostly male crowd lining up for tickets.

"I'm at a big advantage here," she said. "Only men around."

While Wolf said she is not someone who regularly strips in public places, the 40-something computer engineer and occasional theater critic, said "I want to see how I relate to such a group."

For others, Monday's event fulfilled a long-cherished wish — even though they had a hard time explaining why.

Florian Kahlenberg from Munich said he found it "interesting to stroll through a museum naked," adding. "I've always wanted to do that."

Few visitors, naked or dressed, have complained about the show, despite some explicit material showing sexual acts. Described as among the most successful ever staged by the Leopold, it has drawn well over 100,000 people.

That fits with Vienna's relaxed attitude. Its turn-of-the-century decadence allowed Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt to flourish, and the Leopold itself has a world-class collection of those and other artists known for their explicit depiction of the flesh.

But the Austrian capital's acceptance of nudity goes beyond museum exhibits. Thousands of men, women and children skinny dip daily in the Danube along stretches reserved for them during the summer, while racy lingerie ads dot huge billboards across the city all year round and a mass-circulation daily regularly prints photos of half-naked women.

Still, there are limits to Viennese tolerance. The Leopold was forced into cover-up mode last year after complaints over promotional posters plastered city-wide that showed three young and athletic men of different races wearing nothing but blue, white and red socks and soccer boots.

Swaths of red tape were subsequently placed over their sensitive parts.

View the original article here