Greenville museum becomes SC’s newest Smithsonian affiliate

The Smithsonian Institution is hundreds of miles from Greenville, but you don’t have to travel that far to enjoy some of its treasures.

Earlier this week, Greenville became the only city in South Carolina to have two Smithsonian affiliate museums, as the Upcountry History Museum joined the Children’s Museum of the Upstate as a partner of the iconic American institution.

And the first exhibit, “Searching for the Seventies: The DOCUMERICA Photography Project,” makes its national premiere Saturday at Upcountry History Museum.

For museum lovers, having two such museums in Greenville means Smithsonian-quality exhibits, such as the Children’s Museum’s recent “First and Future Artists of Space” exhibit, which paired historical paintings from NASA artist Renato Moncini with art created by local students using images of the cosmos shot by high-tech telescopes.

The Smithsonian has a total of 201 affiliate museums in 45 states, as well as Puerto Rico and Panama. South Carolina now has five affiliated museums, two in Greenville, said Dana Thorpe, executive director of the Upcountry History Museum-Furman University. Others are the State Museum in Columbia ,the S.C. Historical Society in Charleston and The York County Culture and Heritage Museums in Rock Hill.

The partnership will allow the Upcountry History Museum access to the Smithsonian’s collection of more than 140 million artifacts, in addition to programs, exhibits and professional development opportunities for museum staff, Thorpe said.

One of the most exciting components of the affiliation, Thorpe said, is that the Upcountry History Museum can request extended loans of Smithsonian artifacts to be showcased in local exhibits and programming.

Two upcoming exhibitions could benefit from the partnership, “Sacred Sites: Historic Churches of the Upcountry,” which opens July 2, and a “Wizard of Oz”-themed exhibit set for the fall, Thorpe said.

“We had to be named an affiliate first, and then we’re eligible to begin to work with the American History Museum and others,” Thorpe said. “They all have different processes. There are 19 Smithsonian museums, and they each have a different process for applying for the loan of an object.”

And while Dorothy’s iconic ruby red slippers, prominently displayed at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., are unlikely to land in the Upstate, many other interesting items related to the book and the film could make the trip, Thorpe said.

The “Searching for the Seventies” exhibit, which will embark on a national tour after leaving Greenville May 3, “is a fascinating time capsule of the 1970s,” Thorpe said. Much of it focuses on the 1970s environmental movement, but there are other snapshots of daily life, fashion and culture from the decade.

A companion exhibit, “The Ripple Effect,” showcases the Upstate’s environmental history, spotlighting the Reedy River and Lake Conestee. Historic photographs offer a glimpse of the Falls Park area as it was in 1960; the Markley Manufacturing plant, located behind the present-day site of the Peace Center; and Camperdown Mill in the 1950s.

The photographs document “the manufacturing history of the river and how polluted it was, and then the evolution of the river in the city of Greenville, and the group of people who decided to clean up the river, starting in the ’70s,” said Heather Yenco, curator of collections and exhibitions at Upcountry History Museum.

The Upstate’s ties to the Smithsonian go back two centuries, Greenville Mayor Knox White said. “Greenville’s most famous part-time resident,” statesman Joel Poinsett, proposed the creation of a national history museum in Washington, D.C., White said.

When the Smithsonian become a reality in the mid-19th century, “Joel Poinsett’s collection was one of the earliest” to be included, White said. “So here in Greenville, we’ve had a wonderful connection to the Smithsonian all along.”

With the boundless resources of the Smithsonian, Yenco said, the affiliation “just opens up a whole new avenue to interpret history, connecting the national story to Greenville’s story.”

This story was originally published February 14, 2015 at 12:05 AM with the headline "Greenville museum becomes SC’s newest Smithsonian affiliate."