Watch, Read, Listen

On Feb. 22, 2024, Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence sat down with Lori Bettison-Varga, president of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, for a conversation that looked back at The Huntington’s past five years under Lawrence’s leadership and forward at the institution’s strategic aspirations.

“Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis,” puts today’s environmental issues in historical context, examining the profound changes that industrialization and a globalized economy have wrought on everyday life, as charted by artists, scientists, and writers during the 19th century.

This exhibition displays 24 objects and a participatory artwork highlighting how historical Chinese gardens have served as spaces that not only delight the senses and nourish the body but also inspire the mind—both intellectually and spiritually.

California natives add a regional flair to gardens and also support local wildlife; many birds and pollinators prefer native plants, and some depend exclusively on them. Native plants fit a variety of garden niches, from spectacular specimen trees to ground covers, vines, and colorful annuals.

An exploration of photography’s ecological dimensions provides an opportunity to reexamine the role that photography has played in documentation as well as environmental degradation. By examining photographs other than those of classic Western landscapes, we reconsider how Indigenous persons and settlers perceived and interacted with the environment.

Mizuno's site-specific sculpture “Homage to Nature” debuts on May 25, 2024.

During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s, California was an important site of African American creativity, even in the face of intense discrimination. Black enclaves emerged as places where African American leaders, activists, writers, performers, and visual artists could build community and make professional connections.

Centuries before the pop song, love sonnets provided the thrill of peeking into another’s romantic experience. Petrarch’s poems about his adoration of a woman named Laura still impacts how we talk about love today and spawned an early kind of fan fiction that swept the Renaissance reading public.

The Huntington’s Edward Davis Townsend collection contained something rather curious: a spool of thread with a note hidden inside that shed new light on the dramatic events that unfolded shortly after the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860.

Lois Rosson, The Huntington’s 2023–24 Octavia E. Butler Fellow, discusses her experience at NASA, her study of astronomical illustrations as extensions of the frontier West, and Butler’s alternative vision of space.

American artist R.B. Kitaj, one of the major figures in the London art scene of the 1960s, loved books not only for their contents but as tangible objects. Kitaj created an imagined library in screen prints, which is on display in the Huntington Art Gallery through March 4, 2024.

While examining and treating Edward Hopper’s iconic painting “The Long Leg,” Christina M. O’Connell, the Mary Ann and John Sturgeon Senior Paintings Conservator at The Huntington, discovered something that others have overlooked.