Videos and Recorded Programs

A gardener noticed a population of weevils living inside a few cycad cones growing on the property and knew it was a big deal. He showed them to one of The Huntington's botanical researchers who kicked off a project this year to study how the weevils pollinate our Dioon cycads.

David Pearson, former director of culture, heritage, and libraries for the City of London Corporation, looks afresh at the Bridgewater Library, informed by recent work on 17th-century private libraries more broadly, with a view to teasing out its cultural value today.

This is the Zeidberg Lecture in the...

Lonnie G. Bunch III, 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, joins Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence and Huntington Governor Robert C. Davidson Jr. in a conversation about why museums and collecting institutions matter, what they have to offer to contemporary social and racial justice movements, and...

Chinese American composer Nathan Wang, the 2022-23 Cheng Family Foundation Visiting Artist in the Chinese Garden, will introduce his remarkable career and the development of the opera "On Gold Mountain" in collaboration with renowned author Lisa See. The evening will feature highlights from the upcoming...

Robert Flynn Johnson, curator emeritus of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, discusses how Don Bachardy was one of the most insightful draftsmen of his era.

Most artists work in isolation, inventing their art from pure imagination or being inspired by...

An exhibition centered around Joseph Wright of Derby's masterpiece "An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump" becomes a starting point to examine how witnessing experiments with air pumps were critically important for the transfer of scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment and after.

Featuring Otto von...

Tita Chico, professor at the University of Maryland, explores how the concept of wonder during the eighteenth century helps us to see the imaginative underpinnings of how we come to understand the natural world and its various phenomena. Through this lecture, she reveals how feeling played a constitutive role in...

In her new book, Temples in the Cliffside: Buddhist Art in Sichuan, Sonya Lee argues that centuries-old religious monuments can be part of the world's sustainable future. This talk focuses on the transformation of cave temples from religious centers into tourist destinations in southwest China, where venerable...

In response to Mathew Craske's prize winning recent biography of Joseph Wright of Derby, Huntington curators Joel Klein and Melinda McCurdy discuss Wright's iconic painting, Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768) in the exhibition, "Science and the Sublime: A Masterpiece by Joseph Wright of Derby," in...

In this lecture, renowned art historian David Solkin shows how Joseph Wright of Derby constructed conflicting messages out of an eclectic mix of elements drawn from different pictorial traditions in An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump and asks us to consider the artwork's relevance today.

When...

For The Huntington's 2022 Founders' Day celebration, acclaimed writer Charles Yu joins Huntington Trustee Simon K.C. Li to discuss Yu's experiences writing in multiple genres, the role of fiction in constructing identity, current U.S. dialogues about race and identity, and more.

Founders' Day is observed...

In this lecture, David Shields, professor of English language and literature at the University of South Carolina, discusses how Napoleon Sarony (1821–1896) singlehandedly dismantled the traditions of portrait photography in 19th-century America and devised a new photographic ideal.

Shields will reconstruct...