Top Honors
The Booth Western Art Museum tops a USA Today list of best museums in the country.
USA Today has announced that the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, Georgia, has topped the 10Best Readers’ Choice award program in the museum category. The Booth beat out some of the most prestigious museums in the country, including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the
Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
“Wow! We were honored just to be nominated with so many other outstanding museums across the country. I am blown away by the loyalty of our patrons,” says executive director Seth Hopkins. “Quite honestly I am shocked! For us to beat out so many well-known museums is quite amazing. I think it shows how strongly people like our museum and that they were engaged in voting every day as well as encouraging your friends and family to do so as well. It is quite flattering. Nationally we are probably the least-known museum on the entire list, so it’s a win that is kind of like slaying 19 Goliaths at the same time.”
The Booth Western Art Museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, is a 120,000-square-foot museum dedicated to art of the West. Highlights within the vast museum include a Presidential Gallery, Civil War art gallery and Sagebrush Ranch, an interactive children’s gallery. Open since
August 2003, Booth Museum is the only museum of its kind in the Southeast.
For information about the Booth and its exhibitions and programming visit www.boothmuseum.org.
When gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, California’s fate was sealed as a place where fortunes would be made and lost in the West for decades to come. Not only did miners descend on the state— its motto, “Eureka!” relates to the gold find—but so did early photographers.
Some of those early photos of the search for gold are now part of a new exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Gold Rush: Daguerreotypes of Early California opens April 4 and features images that reveal a nation on the cusp of economic, social and environmental change. Organized by the Nelsonatkins Museum of Art and curated by Jane Aspinwall, Gold Rush: Daguerreotypes of Early California will feature nearly 100 works and provide an insightful look into this historic event through the eyes of early photographers.
“These photographs offer a rare glimpse into 19th-century America, providing vivid detail and realism,” says Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, PEM’S James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Deputy Director. “This early form of photography astonished viewers with extraordinary images of everyday life during the gold rush, including city views, studio portraits, gold towns and miners at work in the fields—with a high level of technical and artistic achievement.”
Despite the promise of endless opportunity, most people who ventured to California in search of gold instead found a combination of disappointment, hardship and uncertainty. Gold fever began to subside in the late 1850s. Though few struck it rich, many stayed in the region. Existing images are powerful, but do not fully convey the experience of the California gold rush, overlooking the contested legacies of westward expansion.
“What we know of the gold rush today is a rich and complex blend of reality and myth,” says Stephanie H. Tung, PEM’S associate curator of exhibitions and research. “Most daguerreotypes from the period reveal certain stories while overlooking other narratives. These absences speak to contested ideas of place, identity and belonging that continue to shape our image of America today.”
For information about the exhibition visit www.pem.org.