Videos and Recorded Programs

Peter Sturman, professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, discusses the artistic polymath Xu Wei (1521–1593) and his uninhibited style of calligraphy, known as kuangcao, or "wild cursive." Sturman introduces Xu's calligraphy—particularly, three scrolls that Xu wrote in an...

The Huntington celebrated American artist Kehinde Wiley with a reception in honor of his painting A Portrait of a Young Gentleman, commissioned by The Huntington as a contemporary response to Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy.

Wang Shixiang 王世襄 was 93 years old when he created the inscription “Love for the Lotus Pavilion” for The Huntington. The original handscroll is currently on view as part of the exhibition “A Garden of Words: The Calligraphy of Liu Fang Yuan.”

Mary Shelley likened the writing of her famous book to Victor Frankenstein’s making of his creature. In this lecture, James Chandler, professor at the University of Chicago and The Huntington's R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow, explores Shelley’s “creature,” in what is now one of the most widely-read novels in...

Authors Kristen Case, Gerald Early, Pico Iyer, and Megan Marshall in conversation with Karla Nielsen, Curator of Literary Collections at The Huntington

Spring 2020 and the onset of a global pandemic saw many writers returning to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden for guidance for living...

Nothing generated interest, imitation, and outrage throughout Europe better and more lastingly than Giambattista Guarini's Pastor Fido. In this talk, Eileen Reeves, professor of comparative literature at Princeton University, discusses allusions to the controversies emerging from that frothy and scandalous...

Hilary Mantel, whose literary archive is held at The Huntington, is one of the most critically acclaimed authors working today. Her unprecedented double Booker Prize wins for Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies combined with sell-out West End and Broadway stage adaptations and award-winning...

Jesse Alemán, professor of English at the University of New Mexico, discusses the lives and letters of the Jimeno brothers, whose coming of age in the years before the U.S. Civil War demonstrates that the process of becoming Latino in the United States is a story of uneven assimilation, embattled acculturation, and...

Olga Tsapina, curator of American historical manuscripts at The Huntington, discusses the importance of a little-known photograph from renowned Civil War photographer Mathew Brady's studio that reveals the forgotten pallbearers of Abraham Lincoln, now on display in the exhibition “...

This symposium interrogates the issues raised by contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley's new painting Portrait of a Young Gentleman, which responds to Thomas Gainsborough's grand manner masterpiece The Blue Boy. Between these two paintings, separated by 250 years, lies a colonial history that has...

Huiwen Lu, professor of art history at National Taiwan University, takes the audience into the strange and enchanting world of wild cursive calligraphy when it first appeared in China in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. Lu looks at the development of this script in history as it went from being...

In this talk, Qianshen Bai, professor and Dean of the School of Art and Archaeology, Zhejiang University, explores some foundational questions concerning Chinese calligraphy: How did writing become a fine art in China? Where is the boundary between functional writing and visual art? And what are the social...