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On Exhibit

December 2024
1min read

“The sun never sets on a Disney theme park,” wrote the Disney chairman and CEO Michael Eisner in 1996. That empire, from the first Disneyland, in California, to Tokyo Disney, is the subject of The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks , which runs until August 5 at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. (202-2722448; www.nbm.org ). The exhibition uses 350 objects from the archives of lmagineering—the group Walt Disney assembled in 1952 to plan the parks—including preliminary models, advertisements, and film clips. The museum’s galleries are laid out to follow the scheme of the original park, though thankfully without the four-hour lines or endless broadcasts of “It’s a Small World.”

THE NEWSEUM, IN Arlington, Virginia, is, as its meant-to-be-snappy name may not make clear, a museum whose subject is news and its gathering and dissemination. On exhibit into July is War Stories , which shows how war correspondents have struggled to balance the conflicting requirements of secrecy and disclosure as well as of drama and mundane reality. For information, see www.newseum.org or call 703-284-3544.

In his essay on Esther Bubley in the May issue, Nicholas Lemann wrote that you can “pare and pare” her “large body of work down to its revealed graceful heart, and you still have the grandeur of the whole American enterprise during and after the Second World War.” That grandeur, intimately reflected in her portraits of people going about their lives, will be on display this summer at the DBS PaineWebber Art Gallery in New York City. The exhibition of Bubley’s work opens on July 5 and runs through September 7. For information, call 212-713-2885.

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