Smithsonian Archives of American Art: Digital Collections

A 1963 photo of Walter Gropius on his 80th birthday!

The Archives of American Art have slowly been digitizing their collections and making them available online, thanks to a grant from Chicago's own Terra Foundation for American Art. We found some amazing digital exhibitions in their files, like the archives from The Marcel Breuer Papers. Amid the standard black-and-white furniture photographs are hidden gems like the photo above, a 1963 picture of Walter Gropius's 80th birthday party.

We love the fact that top museums like the Smithsonian have gone digital and made their collections available to a broader audience. Thanks to the Internet, we can now see these treasures that were previously only available to curators and scholars.