Back 40: Experimental Lectures

A little over 60% of The Huntington is open to the public; the remainder is reserved for plant nurseries, storage, and other important operations. Explore the rarely seen “back 40” through experimental, site-specific lectures and a sunset garden gathering. 

This event is the first in a new series of public programs, Research Remix, in which Huntington researchers bring their findings to life in unexpected settings and events around the galleries and gardens.

This program is produced with Place Settings, a site-specific lecture series based in and around Los Angeles that invites scholars, artists, and other creative practitioners to give brief experimental talks prompted by different locations. It is organized by Laura Nelson, current Huntington Research Fellow and historian of radical and experimental education, and Anya Ventura, a writer who works at the Getty Research Institute.

Program 

5:30–6:15 p.m. | Check in at the passenger pick-up/drop-off to board your golf cart to the behind-the-scenes location.

6:30–7:20 p.m. | Two lectures:

• In the first talk, artist Tara Aisha Willis uses The Huntington's backstage area (known as the "back 40") as a laboratory for testing out fragments of recent work, bringing her behind-the-scenes curatorial labor and her writing into physical alignment with her improvisation practice as a dancer. This performance is a riff on artistic substructures: on the base/bass of the song, the support/ground of the artwork, the backstage/greenroom of the stage.
• In the second talk, “after school scores,” scholar Laura Nelson will look behind the scenes of traditional education to think about collective and site-specific experiments in learning outside the classroom. Drawing from an archive of radical education projects from the 1920s-1970s, the talk will introduce “scores” for rethinking where and how learning can happen.

7:20 p.m. | Board golf carts to the Kitchen Garden for a sunset gathering featuring one complimentary beverage. 

8 p.m. | Program ends.

Key Details 

• Guests will be shuttled to the location. Please note: the program includes walking on uneven terrain—wear sturdy shoes.
• Registration includes one complimentary drink at the sunset gathering. Alcoholic and non-alcoholic options available.
• If you’re interested in attending but cannot afford a ticket, please email Kim Tulipana for scholarship information. Scholarship spaces are limited. 

Day of Program

• Check-in begins at 5:30 p.m. at the passenger pick-up/drop-off next to the main entrance.
• The program begins at 6:30 p.m. sharp—please arrive early to allow time for shuttling to the site.

About the Speakers

Tara Aisha Willis is a writer, curator, and artist working at the intersection of dance improvisation and Black life. She is currently Getty Research Institute African American Art History Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow and Curator of Dance & Theater at EMPAC | Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her writing has been published by the Getty Research Institute; Center for Art, Research, Alliances; Danspace Project; Center for Book Arts; liquid blackness; The Black Scholar; Women & Performance; Performance Research; The Brooklyn Rail, and forthcoming from University of Illinois Press. She is co-editor of the 2021 book Marking the Occasion (Wendy’s Subway) and an artist book on taisha paggett (forthcoming, Soberscove Press). She has performed for artists like Will Rawls, Yanira Castro, Anna Sperber, and Paulina Olowska, and belongs to the “Bessie” Award-winning Black feminist improvisation collective, Skeleton Architecture.

Laura Nelson co-organizes experiments in learning and collective study. Her current book project, After School: Collective Experiments in Art, Study, and Education, looks at different formations of learning outside and on the edges of formal institutions from the 1920s-1980s. She is a Barbara Thom long-term research fellow at The Huntington Library and is joining the Princeton English department as an assistant professor this summer.  

Anya Ventura is a writer based in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Frieze, Art in America, The Baffler, Gulf Coast, and The Bennington Review, among others. Having previously held positions at MIT’s Center for Art, Science & Technology and Harvard’s Chinese Art Media Lab, she now works at the Getty Research Institute.