A Message from President Karen R. Lawrence

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, cultural institutions have an opportunity to invite thoughtful reflection. At The Huntington, we do so through THIS LAND IS …—an initiative that draws on the extraordinary breadth of our Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. 

For visitors, this is an invitation: to encounter new perspectives, revisit familiar histories, and experience art, history, literature, and the natural world coming together in ways possible only at The Huntington. 

The title of the initiative itself echoes Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” a song that moves across the American landscape while holding in view both its promise and its contradictions. Our ellipsis is intentional. It reminds us that the American story is unfinished, and that each of us, in our own time, participates in shaping what it becomes. 

Why land? Historically, land is a palimpsest—reflecting layers of possession and dispossession. The word “palimpsest” refers to a manuscript that has been written over but where traces of the earlier text remain.  That idea has resonance for The Huntington’s observance of America at 250, as our collections—across disciplines and across the landscape—preserve records of both belonging and displacement. Through land, we can consider questions of belonging, stewardship, migration, identity, sovereignty, and memory—themes that remain vital today. From our vantage point in California, we can widen the lens of the American story. The founding is often told from the perspective of the original 13 colonies. Looking westward, we see a longer and wider horizon—histories that long predate 1776, and the many ways independence unfolded across geography, through expansion, environmental change, and the meeting of cultures, communities, and traditions. 

The Huntington’s collections make that broader view possible. Here, historical manuscripts are in dialogue with paintings, photographs, rare books, contemporary artworks, and botanical records, tracing how land has been cultivated, claimed, imagined, and revitalized over centuries. 

Anchored by the major Library exhibition “This Land Is …,” opening in June, the initiative extends across the institution: into the reinstalled Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art, Oak Meadow, a renewed landscape connecting art and nature, and a series of public and scholarly programs. Across galleries and gardens, visitors are invited to move through these stories to discover new ways of seeing, to make connections, and to contribute their own voices. 

This exploration also continues in the companion volume, THIS LAND IS …: Field Notes on American Ground, edited by curators Josh Garrett-Davis and Linde B. Lehtinen. Bringing together notable writers, scholars, artists, botanists, and educators, the book offers a range of reflections on land and our relationship to it. These reflections attest to the centrality of land in forming our personal as well as national memories.  I have had the privilege of contributing the foreword to the volume.  

To honor our history is not to idolize it. It is to engage it honestly: to recognize the power of the nation’s ideals and to acknowledge how we have fallen short of them.  It is also to consider how those ideals have been debated, expanded, and reimagined across generations. 

Land makes that process visible. It shows how principles take root in particular places, how they are shaped by law and memory, and how they endure—and evolve—over time. 

We hope you will join us for THIS LAND IS …: Reflections for America at 250—and leave with new ways of seeing the American story and your role in shaping it.