President's Message: The Huntington Today

Jan./Feb. 2020

By the time you receive this issue of Calendar, we will be putting the finishing touches on The Huntington’s first Rose Parade® float in 50 years, readying it for its glide down Colorado Boulevard—a longstanding tradition that celebrates the arrival of another new year. Representing our three collection areas and our research and educational mission, our float (“Cultivating Curiosity”) is funded by donors who believe that the Centennial is exactly the right moment to showcase The Huntington today. As we launch into the second half of our Centennial Celebration, we are thinking about what it means to be relevant 100 years after our founding. What does it mean to be both historic and contemporary? One way to think about the relevance of our materials is to consider how they provide inspiration for artists and writers as well as scholars. For example, our Octavia E. Butler archive, acquired in 2008, is one of our most frequently consulted collections, and in the new year, we will host a series of programs that explore the way Butler’s work continues to be adapted by other writers and artists. In early January, we will host renowned musician and composer Toshi Reagon, as she and guests from diverse disciplines respond through music and spoken word to Butler’s three “Earthseed” novels, including the unpublished Parable of the Trickster. Reagon is known for having transformed Butler’s Parable of the Sower into an opera, which she will present in March at UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance.

In March, we host writer Damian Duffy and illustrator John Jennings, discussing their collaboration in creating a graphic novel of Butler’s Parable of the Sower (to be published in January). This is a return to The Huntington for Duffy and Jennings; they spoke at a lively event in Rothenberg Hall in 2017 about their approach to the graphic novel adaptation of Butler’s early novel, Kindred. And in May, The Huntington will host a half-day event for the public that focuses on Butler and her methodology—that is, how she went about creating the speculative worlds she so vividly brought to life in her novels and how they have inspired a generation of readers, scholars, writers, and activists. (Stay tuned for details in upcoming issues of Calendar.)

Our collections speak to us at every turn and in unexpected ways. Take our 200-year-old Blue Boy, which has been undergoing conservation treatment both in the lab and in public view. Christina Nielsen, director of our art museum, reminds us that this 18th-century grand manner portrait inspired epiphanies in two very different artists who have written about their formative experience viewing the painting in the Huntington Art Gallery: Robert Rauschenberg in the 1940s and Kehinde Wiley in the 1980s. Standing in front of The Blue Boy, years apart, they each realized that they, too, could create works of art.