Carter G. Woodson established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 to publish scientific information about the critical role the black race played in the history of civilization. In 1926, the association announced the first Negro History Week. In 1976, it held the first Black History Month. The Smithsonian kicks off its celebration of this year’s Black History Month with a keynote address by Lonnie G. Bunch III, founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Bunch, a “scholar who brings history to the people,” has spent nearly thirty years in the museum field. His talk is preceded and followed by tours of African American art in the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. (See below.)

 

Tour: Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits 

Sunday, February 3, 2–2:45 pm

National Portrait Gallery

NMAAHC curator Jacquelyn Serwer presents a tour of the inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. One hundred photographs illustrate 150 years of African American resistance to race and class stereotypes. Meet at the Information Desk, First Floor (8th and F entrance).

 

Tour: African American Artists in the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Sunday, February 3, immediately following the lecture

Smithsonian American Art Museum

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is home to one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of art by African Americans. This gallery tour highlights a variety of work—from James Hampton’s glittering tinfoil Throne, to Edmonia Lewis’s allegorical marble sculptures, to William H. Johnson’s modernist scenes of American life. Meet at the Information Desk, First Floor (8th and G entrance).

 

This is the third feature event in the Smithsonian Heritage Month series “Sharing Stories/ Sharing Heritage,” which explores the ways objects and stories connect us to our heritage and to each other, and which celebrates the intersection of culture and oral tradition among communities.

 

Sponsors: National Museum of African American History and Culture, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, and Smithsonian Heritage Months Steering Committee