This exhibition is now travelling the U.S. For itinerary and information, please see the Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition Services (SITES) web site.
"Looping the Loop: Posters of Early Flight," a traveling exhibition featuring 32 vintage European aviation posters, opens April 29 at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. Created primarily to entice spectators to air meets, these rarely found posters document the marketing of early flight from its infancy (1880s) to the beginning of World War I (1915). The exhibition closes July 9.
Beginning with posters advertising hot-air balloon rides at carnivals, the exhibition discusses the history of air meets, the development of the aviation poster genre and the romantic idiom of flight, and the marketing of aviation. To engage spectators and satisfy patrons, early aviation pioneers often combined spectacle with aeronautical innovation, and entertainment with engineering. Air-meet promoters as well as aeronautical inventors used posters to introduce the public to aviation and persuade people to attend meets or buy airplanes. As the general population became entranced by flight, advertisers appropriated aviation imagery as potent symbols of progress, modernity and romance to sell new products unrelated to aviation.
"Posters - the mass medium of the day - were designed to generate excitement about this new technology and encourage consumers to spend their leisure time in the world of aviation," said curator Joanne Gernstein London.
Drawn from the collection of the Allen Airways Flying Museum in El Cajon, Calif., "Looping the Loop" also was supported by the scholarship and expertise of aviation historian Henry Serrano Villard (1900-1996).
Villard, a member of the French Société Générale Aéronautique, frequented local airfields, traveled to various air shows, and met many of the famous pilots of his day. His firsthand knowledge of the early flight period led Villard to publish two books on aviation history: Contact! The Story of the Early Birds (1968) and Blue Ribbon in the Air: The Gordon Bennett Races (1987). "Looping the Loop" includes a selection of Villard's personal mementos such as air meet tickets, aeroclub membership cards and a sketch of an air meet in Naples, Italy in 1912.
full-color book (Kales Press) accompanies the exhibition. Presenting more than 100 full-color reproductions, Looping the Loop: Posters of Flight is a historical retrospective encompassing and expanding upon the exhibition by Henry Serrano Villard and Willis M. Allen, Jr., published in 2000. For more information, call 1 (800) 579-0234. It is available in hardcover for $40.
"Looping the Loop" is organized by the National Air and Space Museum, Allen Airways Flying Museum, and Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES). The exhibition is made possible, in part, through the generous support of Willis and Claudia Allen and the Allen Airways Flying Museum. - more -
Following its premiere in Washington, D.C., the exhibition will travel to the Thames Science Center in Newport, R.I. (July 22 to Oct. 8) and the Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton, Va. (Oct. 29 to Jan. 7, 2001). It will continue its national tour through 2002.
SITES extends the Smithsonian collections, research and exhibitions across the nation and to many countries. Since 1952, SITES has organized and circulated exhibitions on the arts, sciences and humanities. Descriptions and itinerarie are available from the Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition Services (SITES) web site.
The National Air and Space Museum is located at Sixth Street and Independence Avenue, S.W. The museum is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Admission is free.
NOTE TO EDITORS: Slides are available upon request from SITES Public Relations Office, (202) 357-3168 ext. 140. Fax (202) 357-4324.