Videos and Recorded Programs

Tang Qingnian 唐慶年, the 2019 Cheng Family Visiting Artist at The Huntington, screens the video artwork that has been the focus of his yearlong residency. A conversation with the artist follows a virtual screening of his new video. A new musical work composed by pipa virtuoso Wu Man 吳蠻 and shakuhachi artist Kojiro Umezaki 梅崎 康二郎, commissioned by The Huntington, accompanies the video.

Phillip E. Bloom, June and Simon K.C. Li Curator of the Chinese Garden and Director of the Center for East Asian Garden Studies, examines a selection of gardens from Song-dynasty (960–1279) China that explicitly thematized both the sensual and intellectual pleasures of gardening. The talk argues that close attention to the pleasures afforded by Chinese gardens enables us to reconcile their myriad, often contradictory, functions.

Robert Bonner, professor of history at Dartmouth College, probes the deep history of the images, words, and ships that cast odium on the slaveholders’ rebellion of the 1860s. This lecture is a Rogers Distinguished Fellow’s Lecture in Nineteenth-Century American History.

The Caribbean played a central role in the global transformations that began in the fifteenth century. This conference explores the regional, Atlantic, and World approaches to the Caribbean, and what they each mean for thinking about the transformations within and beyond the Caribbean between ca. 1500 and 1800.

One of the most famous works at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough, has been restored and reinstalled in the Thornton Portrait Gallery. This major conservation undertaking involved high-tech data gathering and analysis as well as more than 500 hours of expert conservation work to remove old overpaint and varnish, repair structural materials, and inpaint areas of...

In the summer of 1999, The Huntington was the focus of world-wide attention when it exhibited the first Amorphophallus titanum ever to bloom in California. That first bloom started our cultivation of this strange plant. We now have over forty mature “Corpse Flowers” and this is their story.

Two remarkable—and remarkably different—manuscripts from the Library’s collections are the focus of this presentation and conversation with Li Wei Yang, Curator of Pacific Rim Collections, and Vanessa Wilkie, William A. Moffett Curator of Medieval Manuscripts and British History. Yang explores the dramatic encounters referenced in a recently acquired set of Japanese manuscript scrolls documenting Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s maritime incursion into Japan in 1853 and...

Writer Lynell George discusses her forthcoming book, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, and her experience in The Huntington archives, in conversation with William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute for California and the West and professor of history at USC, and Karla Nielsen, curator of literary collections at The Huntington. George is a Los Angeles-based journalist...