Artist Jim Sanborn spent ten years investigating the Manhattan Project and collecting artifacts from the Black Hole in Los Alamos and many other sources to create a magnificent exhibit called “Atomic Time.” The exhibition opened in 2003 in Washington, DC at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. As the catalogue noted, the exhibition is “pure science, pure seduction, pure art.”
The core exhibition recreates the critical assembly or physics package of the Trinity device. While the measurements are deliberately inexact, the pieces are exquisitely machined and polished, some even made by jewelers. Original electronic components, heavy black cables, and period work lights set the stage for five work tables where the assemblies are recreated.
The exhibition has a home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Working closely with Jim Sanborn, the Atomic Heritage Foundation explored several possible venues from Cambridge to Chicago to Los Alamos and eventually helped facilitate an agreement with the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History (NMNSH) in Albuquerque. Jim Sanborn generously donated the exhibition and many extra pieces collected from the Manhattan Project including Marchant calculators, gooseneck lamps and oak furniture.
Jim Walther, past executive director of the NMNSH, was delighted with this extraordinary gift to the museum.
Thanks to philanthropist Clay Perkins for his generous offer to cover the cost of transportation from Sanborn’s studio in Piney Point, MD to Albuquerque, NM. The museum received nearly two dozen crates of art and artifacts that capture the beginning of the atomic age.