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.

"In looking through the collection, I was interested in boundaries, including political boundaries, and the kinds of practical and theoretical problems they bring up...For a good 50 years after the U.S.-Mexico boundary was drawn, they had to redraw the line every three years and set markers along it, though now it’s pretty clearly delineated and militarized. So, it’s really easy to draw the line but really complicated to make it mean something."

Read more from Rosten Woo, one of our 2019 #5atTheH artists, as he examines ideas of perfection through the lens of Thomas More's "Utopia," early utopian settlements in California, and drawings from an expedition marking the U.S.-Mexico border. 

One of Woo’s contribution’s to the upcoming /five exhibition, “Utopia In Out Over Through,” consists of five audio tours that bridge The Huntington’s garden and gallery and focus on the archive of historian Robert Hine. Rosten’s audio tour takes listeners through stories from Hine’s research: to the U.S.-Mexico border; to Kaweah Colony, a utopian commune in Northern California; and into the Chinese Garden.

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.

It’s 2019, and we’ve got five brand new artists-in-residence at The Huntington! Dana Johnson, Nina Katchadourian, Robin Coste Lewis, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Rosten Woo will all be creating new work inspired by our collections, focused around the theme of “utopia.”

Nina Katchadourian has been searching for monsters in the Library—in medical texts, ancient maps, and rare books.

Her interest in the subject stems from the idea that "Monsters quite readily make people think, fearfully and somewhat negatively, of unknowns, or of the unknowable—things that, in the way they seem different from what we think we are and what we think we know, are ultimately threatening. However, I am more interested in monsters as a catalyst for the imagination, as a kind of prompt that may help us to think—hopefully—about what we still don’t know and what may not be as fixed as we think it is."

Poet Robin Coste Lewis has been researching John James Audubon's life and work, with a specific focus on the landscapes and homes he depicted in the backgrounds of his illustrations.

Writer Dana Johnson has been researching the work of Delilah Beasley, a historian and news columnist who wrote about black pioneers in her book "Negro Trail-Blazers of California.”Johnson is also interested in the historic black community Allensworth, a California town founded in 1908.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz has been exploring the plant cryopreservation lab at The Huntington, as she is interested in the implications of creating a "Noah's Ark" of seeds. Working with botanical curators, her focus has been on the preservation of Magnolia splendens and portoricensus, two tree species that are endangered. Both are trees are native to Puerto Rico, where Muñoz is from.

Muñoz has also spent time filming in the themed, manicured gardens of The Huntington, a contrast to the native habitats of her homeland.

Rosten Woo has been researching the papers of Robert Hine, a scholar of the American West whose research focused on early utopian settlements in California. He has also been studying landscapes produced during an expedition led by John Russell Bartlett. Bartlett was hired to draw the border between Mexico and the U.S. after the Mexican American War in 1846.

Woo is interested in how these communities were formed and funded, and in exploring the relationships between "utopias" and the outside world

The Huntington is collaborating with Clockshop for the fourth year of our contemporary arts initiative /five. The project will culminate in an exhibition that opens in November 2019. 

Images: 

Nina Katchadourian looking at maps from “Theatrum Orbis Terrarum,” (“Theatre of the World”) by Abraham Ortelius, ca. 1606. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

John James #Audubon, detail from “Birds of America,” 1827–38. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Frontispiece of #DelilahBeasley’s “Negro Trail-Blazers of California,” 1919. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz filming in The Huntington’s cryopreservation lab and gardens. 

It’s #ColorOurCollections week! 

We’re kicking off the week with this page from our edition of Thomas More’s Utopia (1518). Download your very own coloring sheet using the link below, and don’t forget to share your masterpiece with us!

...Ybarra has been thinking extensively about the meaning of work, particularly in arts professions and for people of color. For this year’s /five residency, Ybarra and Carolina Caycedo have been taking a careful look at the labor, mainly by people of color, that built Los Angeles and the American West. The economies of culture in the arts world and the film and TV industries have played essential roles in the shaping of Greater Los Angeles, as have narratives about places and people. Hollywood, for example, has tirelessly reinforced racial stereotypes, casting Latinos primarily as maids, gardeners, and criminals. But Ybarra is looking to push beyond these limited perspectives that insist on seeing brown and black bodies almost exclusively as sources of labor rather than as intellectual or cultural producers. “We’re not the guy planting the trees—the brown person you’re most likely to see in places like this. But we’re cultural workers, and right now, it’s our job to sit under the trees and think deeply. That’s work, too.”

Read more about Artist Mario Ybarra Jr. over on Verso

In March 2018, The Huntington announced that it was partnering with East Los Angeles College’s Vincent Price Art Museum (VPAM) for the third year of The Huntington’s /five initiative, inviting noted Los Angeles artists Carolina Caycedo and Mario Ybarra Jr. to create new work in response to The Huntington’s collections around the theme of Identity. The project will culminate in an exhibition that will be on view at The Huntington from Nov. 10, 2018 to Feb. 25, 2019. Carribean Fragoza, a freelance journalist who writes about art in Southern California, focuses in this post on Mario Ybarra Jr.

images:

Artist Mario Ybarra Jr. at work. Photo by Kate Lain.

Ybarra holds a printing plate etched with his self-portrait. It was inspired by small, intimate works by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and a portrait of Dürer himself by Wenceslaus Hollar (1607–1677) that Ybarra viewed at The Huntington. Photo by Kate Lain.

Excited to announce our partnership with the Vincent Price Art Museum for the third year of /five, our five-year contemporary arts initiative—AND introduce Carolina Caycedo and Mario Ybarra Jr., two amazing L.A. artists who will be creating new work inspired by our collections. 

Caycedo and Ybarra plan to focus on the ways in which labor and capital in the late 19th & early 20th centuries indelibly shaped Los Angeles, and investigate the formation of Angeleno identity since the era of the city's founders (pobladores).

The project will culminate in an exhibition at The Huntington in the fall of 2018, while a concurrent, multi-artist exhibition will be presented at the Vincent Price Art Museum.

Read more about the /five project for 2018 over at huntington.org.