with who we are and what we do. The office must cope with 

 decreasing economic support and dynamic changes in society 

 that are forcing museums to fundamentally restructure. These 

 factors are altering both the way that work is done in muse- 

 ums and the kinds of training and professional development 

 opportunities needed to retool staff at all levels. At the same 

 time, the diverse constituencies of the office are exploring new 

 forms of researching and presenting their cultures and tradi- 

 tions. Looking ahead, the office must develop programs and 

 services that understand and respond to these new forms. The 

 name change reflects the office's role at the Institution as the 

 center of museological research and also aligns with universi- 

 ties offering museum studies programs. The links and net- 

 working which the office makes with museums and other 

 institutions can only be enhanced by this change. 



Smithsonian Institution Traveling 

 Exhibition Service 



Anna R. Cohn, Director 



The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service 

 (SITES) is committed to making Smithsonian exhibitions 

 available to millions of people who cannot experience them 

 firsthand on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. 



SITES' FY 1994 program mirrored the scope and vitality of 

 the Smithsonian as never before. New traveling exhibitions 

 about spiders, jazz, ocean conservation, the U.S.-Mexico bor- 

 derlands, and gospel music are but a small sampling of the di- 

 verse subjects through which SITES represented collections 

 and research from the Institution's many museums and offices. 



Over the past year, collaborations — with sister museums at 

 the Smithsonian and other museums and cultural organiza- 

 tions outside the Smithsonian, foreign countries, corporations, 

 or at the grass-roots level — have driven the SITES program. 

 Several new SITES exhibitions, themselves the result of highly 

 successful partnerships, began national tours. These collabora- 

 tions help to ensure more than ever that the wealth of the 

 Smithsonian Institution can be experienced by audiences ev- 

 erywhere: from people in the nation's largest urban centers to 

 those in the most remote rural areas. 



SITES took a major step forward during the past year to ex- 

 pand its national audience with a new initiative aimed at 

 bringing the Smithsonian to rural communities. One of the 

 most important of SITES' collaborations of the past year was 

 the development of a small format version of the highly suc- 

 cessful SITES/National Museum of American History exhibi- 

 tion titled, "Produce for Victory: Posters on the American 

 Home Front, 1941-1945." This panel exhibition, which in- 

 cludes reproductions of colorful posters circulated throughout 

 the United States during World War II to mobilize the 

 nation's support of the overseas war effort, was created in mul- 



tiple copies and tailored to 25 locations in Georgia, Illinois, 

 Oregon, Utah, and West Virginia, in cooperation with the hu- 

 manities councils of those states. Curator Larry Bird and labor 

 history specialist Harry Rubenstein, both of the National Mu- 

 seum of American History, were the Smithsonian scholars for 

 the original exhibition from which this one has been 

 reformatted. Rural exhibitors will complement the display 

 with local objects and local programming. 



This partnership between the Smithsonian and state hu- 

 manities councils is making the Institution's offerings accessi- 

 ble in underserved areas of the nation, one of SITES' primary 

 goals. Working with the state humanities councils has en- 

 abled SITES to identify an audience that often has been diffi- 

 cult to reach, and has allowed the communities to work with 

 local scholars in bringing exciting humanities programming 

 to their audiences. SITES expects that the impact of public 

 outreach attained by projects like "Produce for Victory," will 

 be far-reaching and will be followed by more exhibitions of 

 this type in the future. Funding for this project was provided 

 by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Smithsonian Special 

 Exhibition Fund, and the National Endowment for the 

 Humanities. 



Other important partnerships over the past year at the 

 grass-roots level included SITES' work with The Links, a vol- 

 untary national service organization dedicated to promoting 

 education, social services, philanthropic ventures and the arts. 

 SITES is joining forces with The Links on the upcoming proj- 

 ect, "Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Song and 

 Worship Traditions," which is being developed with curator 

 Bernice Johnson Reagon and the National Museum of Ameri- 

 can History. It is planned that local chapters of The Links will 

 work in partnership with host museums across the nation to 

 produce public programs, assist with the collection of addi- 

 tional local artifacts to augment the display, serve as docents, 

 and aid in fundraising at the local level. Other components of 

 "Wade in the Water" include a 26-part National Public Radio 

 series, a series of books on African American sacred music tra- 

 ditions, and several compact discs and cassette tapes. 



SITES has continued its highly successful collaborations 

 with its sister Smithsonian museums on the Mall. Of these, 

 SITES will travel "Spiders! ", a major exhibition about these 

 ubiquitous insects organized by the National Museum of Nat- 

 ural History, to 10 cities in the United States and Canada. 

 SITES is also collaborating with the National Museum of Nat- 

 ural History and the Smithsonian's Office of Environmental 

 Awareness on the traveling exhibition, "Ocean Planet," which 

 will explore the majesty, diversity, bounty and environmental 

 threats to Earth's vast oceans. 



Other Smithsonian partnerships include "Beyond Category: 

 The Musical Genius of Duke Ellington," organized by SITES 

 and the National Museum of American History and the first 

 exhibition of the ten-year jazz project initiative titled, 

 "America's Jazz Heritage, A Partnership of the Lila- Wallace 

 Reader's Fund and the Smithsonian Institution." The exhibi- 

 tion opened over the past year to great public and critical ac- 



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