#100attheh

Opening this Saturday, Nov. 9: exhibition Beside the Edge of the World began with a treasured book in The Huntington’s collections: a first edition of Thomas More’s Utopia, printed in 1516. This 500-year-old text served as a jumping-off point for the fourth year of /five, The Huntington’s contemporary arts initiative, in partnership with Los Angeles arts organization Clockshop. 

Three artists and two writers were invited to consider More’s classic work as they explored The Huntington’s collections. The process of discovery started with ideas of mapping borders and edges, temporarily forgotten histories, peoples whose lives had been carefully recorded—and then forgotten—and utopian experiments in communal living. Many of these places and the people who challenged the dominant narratives of history existed on the periphery. 

Read more about each project below:

Artist Nina Katchadourian’s work Strange Creature was inspired by The Huntington’s collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps and books, as well as the ancient Chinese mythological text Shan Hai Jing (Guideways through Mountains and Seas). The myriad of creatures depicted in these ancient texts offered a challenge: How much have we really seen of the world, and how well do we know it? Katchadourian imagined a creature, somewhat familiar but also strange, slowly surfacing from our own Chinese Garden’s Lake of Reflected Fragrance. Her installation suggests that there is more around us than we can see or perceive—literally, and perhaps also in an otherworldly sense. See if you can catch a glimpse of her creation in the Chinese Garden. 

Writer Robin Coste Lewis was inspired by a particular passage in Henry David Thoreau's canonical Walden; or, Life in the Woods. In a chapter titled “Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors,” Thoreau describes the community of free Blacks that had been living around Walden Pond long before Thoreau arrived. For Lewis, this passage contained a hidden call to the rediscovery of African American histories woven into the story of Concord, Massachusetts, and hence, America. In order to extend Thoreau’s experiment, she omitted much of the chapter’s text and rearranged the remaining lines to emphasize, lyrically, the free Black community that had once called the woods home. 

Artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s film Laurel Sabino y Jagüilla takes its title from a species native to the artist’s birthplace and home on the island of Puerto Rico, a flowering plant now endangered by logging and wood harvesting. Magnolia is an ancient genus, dating back 20 million years; its family, Magnoliaceae, has survived ice ages, mountain formation, and continental drift. Filmed in the rain forest of Puerto Rico and in the gardens of The Huntington, the work imagines the relationship of Magnolia splendens to utopia, photography, soil, vision, and time.

Writer Dana Johnson’s short story Our Endless Ongoing reimagines the life of Delilah Beasley in early twentieth-century California. Delilah Leontium Beasley (1871–1934), an American historian and columnist for the Oakland Tribune, was one of the first African American women to be published regularly in a major metropolitan newspaper. She also became the first person to document the overlooked but significant history of California’s Black pioneers, in her book The Negro Trail-Blazers of California (1919), published the same year as the founding of The Huntington.

Artist Rosten Woo created Another World Lies Beyond as a series of interrelated stories told through audio, projection, and artifact, installed in the gallery and in the gardens to invite contemplation and political reflection. The narrative through-line is the life and work of Robert V. Hine (1921–2015), a scholar of California utopian communities whose papers are housed at The Huntington. Each audio story offers a glimpse of an idea of the perfect state and the world just beyond it. Additionally, a short animated film by Woo brings together all the illustrations from John Russell Bartlett’s failed 1857 survey of the U.S.–Mexico border, included in the Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey.

images:

Nina Katchadourian looks at maps from Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World) by Abraham Ortelius, ca. 1606. Photo by Kate Lain.

Nina Katchadourian (b. 1968), Study for “Strange Creature,” 2019. Watercolor, pencil, gouache on paper. Courtesy of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, and Pace Gallery.

Robin Coste Lewis (b. 1964), excerpt from poetry chapbook Inhabitants and Visitors, Los Angeles, Clockshop, 2019. 

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz filming in The Huntington’s gardens. The Huntington. Photo by Kate Lain. 

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (b. 1972), film still from Laurel Sabino y Jagüilla, 2019. Courtesy of the artist. 

Dana Johnson at The Huntington. Photo by Kate Lain.

Dana Johnson (b. 1967), “Our Endless Ongoing” featured in Trailblazer: Delilah Beasley’s California, Los Angeles, Clockshop, 2019.

Rosten Woo at The Huntington. Photo by Kate Lain.

Rosten Woo (b. 1977), excerpt from Another World Lies Beyond, 2019. 

Support for this exhibition is provided by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation, the Pasadena Art Alliance, and WHH Foundation.

Get ready to party. Starting Sept. 5, we'll be launching a yearlong series of centennial festivities in honor of our 100th birthday. Here are few of the ways we’ll be celebrating, in no particular order:

For the first time in 50 YEARS, we’ll have a float in the 2020 Rose Parade. 

Our massive exhibition highlighting 1919, the year of our founding, opens Sept. 21, 2019. “Nineteen Nineteen” will feature around 275 objects from The Huntington’s holdings, each created, edited, acquired, or published in the year 1919.

A new rose has been created especially for our centennial, named “Huntington’s 100th.’ The bloom produces pink then yellow petals and smells amazing (like fruity lemon blossoms).

Exhibition “Utopia” [working title] will open Nov. 10, in collaboration with Los Angeles arts organization Clockshop (part of The Huntington's contemporary arts initiative /five.) See new works by artists Nina Katchadourian, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Rosten Woo and writers Dana Johnson and Robin Coste Lewis, Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. Each participant is investigating ideas of perfection and utopia using Thomas More's satirical work Utopia (1516) as a foundational text and starting point. 

A program part of the President’s Series will feature actors from the Independent Shakespeare Co. of Los Angeles reading and comparing portions of the so-called “bad quarto” of Hamlet with the version audiences are familiar with. Zachary Lesser, professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, will provide commentary. 

Launching Sept. 6, we’ll be giving away 100 Memberships to the first 100 Los Angeles County college students who apply (!!!!!!!). Students may enter by sending an email to [email protected] on or after Sept. 6, 2019. 

The Chinese Garden expansion, featuring a new art gallery, restaurant, and more, will reopen in spring 2020. GET READY.

For more upcoming centennial programs, events, exhibits, and activities, go here

images:

The Huntington's 1969 Rose Parade® float, sponsored by the city of San Marino, Calif. The Huntington.

Cover of Nineteen Nineteen (2019) catalog by James Glisson and Jennifer Watts; Portrait of Henry E. Huntington on Loggia of San Marino Residence, April 1919. The Huntington.

‘Huntington's Hundredth' commemorative rose. Photo courtesy of Weeks Roses.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Robin Coste Lewis, Nina Katchadourian, Dana Johnson, and Rosten Woo. Photo: Kate Lain

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet (1603). The Huntington. 

Visitors in the Chinese Garden at The Huntington. Photo by Piper Ferguson.

Coming this fall: a massive centennial exhibition centered on 1919, the year of our founding. 

A tumultuous time in our nation's history, "Nineteen Nineteen" will tell the story of a year in which soldiers returned from World War I, African Americans faced violence during the “Red Summer,” women fought for the right to vote, and cripplingly high inflation sparked labor unrest. 

The show will feature approximately 275 objects from across The Huntington's collections, each made, published, edited, exhibited, or acquired in 1919. 

Read more about the upcoming exhibition here

image:

The eye-catching new rose that is helping The Huntington celebrate its centennial year was unveiled just a few months ago. But 'Huntington's 100th' got its start a decade ago, through a painstaking hybridization process that is as much art as science.

Tom Carruth has been The Huntington’s E.L. and Ruth B. Shannon Curator of the Rose Collection since 2012. Before that, he spent 25 years as a rose hybridizer, working as director of research and marketing for Weeks Roses, a wholesale rose grower, and becoming one of the nation’s leading creators of new roses. Over his career, he has introduced more than 150 new roses, including 11 All-America Rose Selections winners and four recipients of James Alexander Gamble awards, bestowed by the American Rose Society, for outstanding new and very fragrant roses.

More on Verso...

images:

‘Huntington’s 100th’, the newly hybridized rose chosen to help celebrate The Huntington’s centennial year, is a large-flowered, multi-colored rose with an intense fragrance. Photo by Gene Sasse.