Three Smithsonian museums reopened in Washington, D.C. Friday (5/14): The Museum of African American History and Culture, the American Art Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery. The first lady said it was “culture and beauty coming back to D.C.”

First lady Jill Biden on Friday marked the reopening of Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C., with a visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The American Art Museum, National Portrait Gallery, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) opened their doors Friday after shutting down during the pandemic. “You can understand the pandemic. We’ve been through them before. You can understand what social justice movements have occurred in the past and how this moment looks like something from the past, is informed by history – that’s what history does. It helps us understand the now,” Beverly Morgan-Welch, Associate Director for External Affairs at the NMAAHC, said.

Washington’s famed Smithsonian Museums began to reopen Friday after being closed to the public since November due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The National Gallery of Art, National Portrait Gallery, and National Museum of African American History and Culture are scheduled to open on Friday. Meanwhile, the National Museum of American History — home to Dorothy's ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz and a pair of Muhammad Ali's boxing gloves — is set to reopen on May 21.

‘All That She Carried.’ Harvard professor Tiya Miles traces the faint archival history of two women through slavery using as her compass a simple object that was passed down from mother to daughter in a desperate act of love. The object was a cotton sack containing a dress, some pecans and a braid of hair given by Rose as a parting gift to her daughter Ashley, who was sold into slavery at age 9. Mother and daughter never saw each other again. The sack would remain in Ashley’s family, though. In 1921, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered the story onto the sack, and today it resides in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Administrators chose the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian, Lonnie G. Bunch III, as the main Commencement speaker. Bunch previously served on GW’s faculty as a professor of museum studies and history from 1990 to 2000 and was also the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The Howard University School of Divinity (HUSD) and joint sponsors Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS) and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) are calling for individual and panel paper proposals for a virtual conference, “The Troubles I’ve Seen: Religious Dimensions of Slavery and Its Afterlives,” that will examine the long-term effects of the enslavement of Africans in America from a unique perspective of the religious and theological dynamics. The conference will be held October 22-23, 2021.

The Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of African American History and Culture has worked with the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission and the State Library of North Carolina to shine a light on a hidden part of history in the Freedmen's Bureau, formally known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands.

Although Althea Adams never took up an instrument like her father, America’s first black U.S. Navy bandmaster Alton Adams— his flute and piccolo are displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture — an inner music seemed to uplift her. “She was a positive person. She lived a happy, happy life,” Larry Finch said.