Smithsonian Snapshot

This painting features 18 iconic jazz musicians.

Learn more about Selena’s leather outfit, her life, and her legacy.

Delicate cherry blossoms fall like snow.

Remembering an American Labor Rights Leader.

Matthew Henson participated as a navigator and translator in six expeditions to the North Pole; he reached the Pole with Matthew E. Peary in 1909.

A cough medicine with tar, wild cherry, etc.

A practitioner of photorealism, Estes portrays the urban landscape.

This solitary hunter depends on its terrific eyesight to hunt its prey at night.

Commemorating ancestors for Día de los Muertos.

This clay vessel depicts a Mesoamerican deity represented as an old man and associated with fire.

All 33 native Hawaiian forest bird species, including this ʻIʻiwi, are currently endangered or at risk of becoming endangered.

Using almost 6 miles of the same fire-proofed yarn, more than 120 volunteers and knitting enthusiasts from around the Smithsonian assembled the “yarnbomb.”

It is no coincidence that these tiny pests swarm around people’s faces and often end up in their eyes. 

This cone-headed katydid (Copiphora rhinoceros) unsurprisingly gets its name from its pointy-shaped head.

A powerful process of seeing and naming created the tea-leaf storage jar named Chigusa.

The passenger pigeon was once the most common bird in the United States

One way or another, she's gonna get you.

There’s something about the pointy ears and the cool gadgets that make him one of the most intriguing superheroes of all time.

On Dec. 9 and 10, 1964, John Coltrane and his quartet recorded A Love Supreme.

Self-trained as an artist, Kiyochika set out to record his views of Tokyo. 

In the late 1960s, Jimi Hendrix shattered the notion of what the electric guitar could be.

 Through his work, Ramirez magnified the stuff of everyday life to reveal the history embedded in popular icons.

Before the invention of indoor rinks, ice skaters turned to the Volito when they needed to practice.

A festive tradition in Spain, Puerto Rico, and many Latin American countries, Three Kings Day commemorates the arrival of the three kings in Bethlehem.