Deborah Cramer's SMITHSONIAN OCEAN: OUR WATER, OUR WORLD in the New York Times

Diving Into a New World
Edward Rothstein
New York Times, September 26

The Sant Ocean Hall at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, which opens on Saturday, isn’t just about 71 percent of the Earth’s surface. It is the largest renovation in the museum’s century-long history and a transformation of its largest exhibition space, making it as much about the museum’s future as about the ocean’s.

Yes, of course, water takes center stage. When you enter the new hall off the Beaux Arts rotunda, the dimmed, atmospheric lighting is meant to suggest the sea; an illuminated blue panel coaxes: “Dive in. Discover it with us.” And well above floor level are eight giant video screens showing schools of fish and sea creatures near Belize, the Galápagos Islands and other aquatic utopias pulsing with oceanic life. It is as if the entire 23,000-square-foot exhibition space were submerged in a giant natural aquarium...

There is room for improvement, of course. In some galleries explanations could be clearer. And the museum could have been more imaginative in some expositions, the way Deborah Cramer so often is in her inspiring companion volume to the hall, “Smithsonian Ocean: Our Water, Our World.”

But so much can be learned here, and the new model of the museum is so well integrated with the valuable parts of the old that the Ocean Hall makes the sea change in museum life look promising.

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