Diane Shaw

@museocat.bsky.social

1977 Followers 2466 Following

Retired museum library cataloger in Washington, DC area. Fond of birds and travel.

Title page: Margaret Atwood. Morte de Smudgie, with Alfred Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur. Artwork by Audrey Niffenegger. San Francisco: The Arion Press, 2021.
An abstract black & white print of a poster announcing an exhibition by Gordon Onslow Ford. The print has circles, straight lines and scratchings which somewhat resembles an overhead view of a landscape with trees and paths.
A naturally formed small snow and ice sculpture with 3 horizontal tiers, looking somewhat like a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Red-and-black printed cover of a pamphlet from the Walters Art Gallery for Christmas 1960, illustrated with a Medieval-style outline of a knight in black with a red shield. The knight’s feet rest upon a small snarling lion, in the fashion of a memorial plaque. This item is from the Artists Files collection at the Smithsonian’s American Art / National Portrait Gallery Library.
A great array of pumpkins, flowers, plastic skeletons, and a witch adorning the front steps to a townhouse in Manhattan.
A No Kings protester holding a hand-made sign reading “the only orange monarch we want is a butterfly” A side view of a fluttering Monarch butterfly and green leaves are drawn on the sign.
60-something white lady wearing a straw hat and a No Kings black T-shirt with a design from the cartoonist known as Tom Tomorrow, holding a hand-made poster featuring the Virginia state flag (“Virginians say no to tyrants”) and the US flag (“No kings in the USA”).
Four members of the string band Mipso on stage at the Lincoln Theatre in DC.
A large yellow box with antique-looking fluted speakers, against a backdrop of painted faces on boxes and framed cartoon-style portraits.
A sculpture showing a large multi-colored tractor beam emanating from a flying saucer, with a small bewildered man standing in the center of the beam.
Title panel for “OSGEMEOS: Endless Story” at the Hirshhorn. Next to the title there is a yellow cartoon figure of a man with large glasses and pointed shoes with a triangular hat, in a red-decorated yellow suit.
Two separate etchings of dogs by Charles Sindelar. On the left are two Pekingese puppies in sepia tone; on the right is a side profile of a dog (Scottish terrier maybe?) in black on a white background. The etchings were done for the California Etchers Association in 1929.
Orange fabric with small yellow and black images of cats misbehaving in various amusing ways. The artist Veve also said he was picturing the cats in the style of Rodin’s Gates of Hell or Picasso’s Guernica.
A peacock with feathers in brilliant shades of green, black and white stripes and light brown, with an electric blue head, standing on a large Moroccan zellige tile basin The peacock’s long tail is draped down the side of the basin touching the floor.
Colorful sign for the Komatsu celebration of construction on the National Mall, showing cranes & other equipment with the US Capitol in the background.
Neoclassical facade of the USDA headquarters in Washington DC, viewed from the National Mall side. Between the stately columns are two large banners, one of Abraham Lincoln’s face and the other featuring a color photo of a glowering Donald Trump.
Poster for the “Timeless Mucha” exhibition at the entrance to the Phillips Gallery in DC, showing a woman with a flowing mane of brown hair.
Sticker: “No one voted for the Muskrat” in letters surrounding Elon Musk’s head (with distinctive muskrat features), set inside a red circle with diagonal line.
Centerpiece of the 2025 Philadelphia Flower Show, featuring a 4-sided open red cube with purple hanging flowers in the center, sited on a pool of water and surrounded by yellow and blue flowers with lush green foliage.
Seen at New Orleans’ Mardi Gras World: part of a parade float featuring Trombone Shorty.
Sticker on a traffic pole, showing a red and white-striped hand with white stars on blue fingers, holding a fork. The text says, “Fork Off! I support federal workers.”
Five bison grazing on a grassy hillside with rounded rock formations tinged with white and pink in the background. Theodore Roosevelt National Park, South Unit, North Dakota.
A part of Laurie Anderson’s room full of stream-of-consciousness texts and drawings on the wall and floor at the Hirshhorn Museum. A couple of her thoughts here: “Who Owns the Moon?” and “Are Mountains Awake?”
Title panel for the exhibition “Basquiat x Banksy” (black block letters on an orange wall) at the Hirshhorn Museum in DC, on view until October 26, 2025.
Small yellow flowers with many petals called “Adonis amurensis” with a background of gray mulch and fallen leaves.
Two small posters, one printed with a pink unicorn and the caption, “Trans Rights are Human Rights,” and the other has a photo montage of various Trans persons embracing, with the caption, “Trans is Beautiful.” Both posters are from the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, created for the 2018 exhibit of the Trans Altar by Sol Aramendi & Lunicorns and the National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures.
An iridescent teal and dark blue flying insect (genus Chrysis) on a green milkweed leaf.
Cover of the 2022 book, “Into the Inferno: a Photographer’s Journey Through California’s Megafires and. Fallout” by Stuart Palley. The cover photo show Palley in protective garb holding an SLR camera in his right hand and another camera mounted on his hard hat. Behind him flames and smoke fill the air.
Entrance to the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum, a multistory beige building with 3 rows of windows, with green trees leading up to the front door.
A tiny side view of the White House in Washington DC, blocked off by tall metal fencing and traffic cones. A sign on the fence says “Danger, construction site, hard hat required.”
A very tall Christmas tree with white and gold ornaments surrounded by boxes wrapped in gold and sliver paper with bows, in the very ornate lobby of the historic Willard Hotel in Washington DC.
Public service advertisement seen in downtown Washington DC: a cartoon-style side profile of an old white man wearing a MAGA hat and carrying a book captioned “Project 2025,” with a large red circle with a diagonal bar across it. The image header is “Keep DC Trash Free.”
A turquoise blue wooden door decorated with black studs, with a curved arch above the entrance, set within a two-toned powder blue stucco wall, seen in Chefchaouen, Morocco.
A cat’s face illustrated with quick daubs of paint by Bonnard peeks out from the lower left corner of the canvas (from Bonnard’s Fruit and Fruit Dishes, painted in oil circa 1930; exhibited at the Phillips Gallery in DC in 2024).
A mostly white rock dove (pigeon) with black at the base of the neck and the edges of the wings and tail, standing on a brick cobblestone walkway.
Oil painting by Ludovic Napoléon Lepic (1874), showing a raven hovering over a water-logged open book (maybe an illuminated manuscript?) that was tossed into a marsh by a flood. Drooping flowers surround the volume. The painting is inspired by the Biblical flood in the book of Genesis.
Title panel for the Glass Flowers exhibition at the Harvard University Natural History Museum: The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants Spruces Pines Ginkgo Onions Agaves Cypress Horsetails Ferns Lilies Trilliums Orchids Magnolias ANGIOSPERMS Water Lilies Spurges Beans Sundews Milkweeds Coffee Tomatoes Club Mosses Mosses Liverworts Carrots Sunflowers Popularly known as the "Glass Flowers," the Ware Collection is a unique assemblage of botanical models produced for Harvard University between 1886 and 1936 by Czech glassworkers Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. The collection features 780 different species of flowering and nonflowering plants represented by nearly 850 life-sized models and over 3,000 enlargements that detail plant anatomy and morphology with startling accuracy. This exhibition of the Ware Collection models is organized according to a modern scientific understanding of evolutionary relationships among major plant groups, which are represented in our plant family tree by nine graphical icons. The group affiliation of each species in the exhibition is identified by one of these icons. Although flowering plants, or angiosperms, dominate this exhibition, common nonflowering groups such as ferns and cone-bearing gymnosperms, are also represented.
Entrance to the exhibition “Sublime Light: Tapestry Art of DY Begay” at the National Museum of the American Indian in DC. The title has a background of a sunrise sky with streaks of pink, yellow, orange and blue, over a dark landscape of silhouetted trees and mesas.
Entrance to the exhibition “Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains” at the National Museum of the American Indian in DC, showing an illustrated buckskin garment.
A panel of 5 seated Smithsonian staff members with an introductory speaker at the lectern. A title slide for the event is projected on a rear screen: “Digital Tools for Collections Stewardship.”
Northwest corner of the National Museum of the American Indian in DC, with curving beige stone walls and a small waterfall over dark colored stones.
The Washington Monument seen looking west from the center of the National Mall. The sky is a hazy blue.
A stonework castle-style building with four towers with pointed conical roofs (a clock is on the rooftop of the tallest tower), located on a tiny island in the St. Lawrence River in the Thousand Islands region of New York State. The building is the power house for Boldt Castle.
Portrait of Sylvia Beach, the founder of the Parisian bookshop “Shakespeare and Company” painted in oil by Paul-Émile Bécat in 1923. The painting shows the upper half of Beach, whose face has an unsmiling side-eye expression. She wears a dark jacket with white cuffs and collar, with a red, green, black and white bow-tie.
Entrance to the “Brilliant Exiles” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, featuring a beautiful triptych painted by Edward Steichen circa 1910-1913 in richly colored tempera & gold leaf. Titled “In Exaltation of Flowers”, it portrays 3 noted ex-pat American women who moved to Paris: Katherine Nash Rhoades, Marion H. Beckett & Mercedes de Cordoba Acosta.
An interior courtyard scene in a historic beige stone building, with a plant bed with shrubs and two tall green leafy trees surrounded by a white marble bench (Kogod Courtyard in the Smithsonian American Art Museum & National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC)
A rectangular courtyard with rounded stone arches, large windows with black and bronze hardware, and a red and white brick floor. In the center there’s a bubbling small fountain. Green plants are around the edges.
Women’s march poster showing a black cat with an orange hairpiece in its mouth.
DC women’s march crowd scene on November 2, 2024; signs reading “Trust Women” & “Defeat the Day One Dictator.”
Title page of a pamphlet issued by the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions in November 1944, quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt: “But when the ballots are cast, your responsibilities do not cease …”
Night view of the lit-up Blue Water Bridge on the St. Clair River connecting the US and Canada at Port Huron.
The small cruise ship “Pearl Mist” docked on the Welland Canal (Ontario, Canada), part of the St. Lawrence Seaway.
An orange and black Gulf Fritillary butterfly with a background of mixed flowers and foliage, seen in Oklahoma City recently.
Downtown Washington DC skyline after a brief rain shower. A rainbow appears in the distance. Roy Lichtenstein’s blue sculpture “Modern Head” is visible on the left side.
Jay Gorney Modern Art Gallery notice for a show of paintings by Alexis Rockman, featuring a man installing a giant millipede model in a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History (based on a photo by museum photographer Alex J. Rota).