"This Land Is ..." Exhibition

The exhibition’s title references the iconic 1940s song “This Land Is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie, with the ellipsis inviting reflection on the American project and land as both a geographical and metaphorical space of promise, struggle, and belonging. 

Moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from precolonial America to the 21st century, the exhibition presents multiple perspectives addressing such topics as opportunity and dispossession, mapping and ecology, and preservation and repair. A wide range of voices from the past and present—across distant geographies—come together through documents, artworks, and artifacts to tell a multilayered story.  

Exhibition Highlights

• Two rare, annotated July 1776 printings of the Declaration of Independence 
• Unique documents from the history of surveying American lands, including a hand-drawn survey of Mount Vernon by George Washington and a hand-drawn design for a garden at Monticello by Thomas Jefferson, as well as a rare map of the 1760s survey of the Mason-Dixon Line and a manuscript page from Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon 
• Documents related to colonial Pennsylvania’s swindle of more than a million acres of Delaware/Lenape land in the infamous Walking Purchase 
• Literary evocations of land in manuscripts by Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Octavia E. Butler 
• A 1936 acoustic guitar owned by itinerant songwriter and activist Woody Guthrie and inscribed with the words “This Machine Kills Fascists,” courtesy of the Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle, Washington 
• Drawings, journal pages, and a painting of George Washington made by Woody Guthrie, courtesy of the Woody Guthrie Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma 
• Explorations of the U.S.-Mexico border from a survey after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to present-day art and political contestation 
• Civil War and Reconstruction–era materials including photography, personal writings, and a Congressional resolution to pass the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery 
• Depictions of the national park system from its origins to the present  
• Family photographs and documents by Japanese American flower farmers in Los Angeles before, during, and after their World War II incarceration 
• Contemporary artworks that confront historic and contemporary revolutions, displacements, and communities, including photographs by William Camargo and Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), and a large painting by the late Los Angeles muralist Noni Olabisi 
• Other artistic expressions about American lands and histories from California painter Agnes Pelton and Gee’s Bend, Alabama, quilter Mary Lee Bendolph 

Companion Materials 

Essay Volume

A richly illustrated companion book titled This Land Is …: Field Notes on American Ground features a diverse roster of writers, scientific and humanities scholars, and artists who reflect on the theme of the land and their relation to it. Edited by Garrett-Davis and Lehtinen, the volume includes a foreword by Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence. Contributors include Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; historians Natalia Molina and Claudio Saunt; authors Terry Tempest Williams, Jamaica Kincaid, and Lisa See; graphic novelists Kiku Hughes and Julie Fiveash (Diné); and artists Sandy Rodriguez and Mercedes Dorame (Tongva). The publication is illustrated with historical documents, photographs, and artworks, including a foldout of one of The Huntington’s unique 1776 printings of the Declaration of Independence. This Land Is … (ISBN: 978-0-87328-274-1, $45) will be distributed worldwide by the University of Pennsylvania Press beginning in June 2026.