Videos and Recorded Programs

Toshi Reagon, acclaimed composer and lyricist, discusses her operatic adaption of Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction novel Parable of the Sower with special guests. Presented in association with UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance.

Go behind-the-scenes with Rosten Woo, Dana Johnson, and Nina Katchadourian, as they explore The Huntington’s collections through the lens of Thomas More’s “Utopia.” Their research informed new works created for the exhibition “Beside the Edge of the World.”

The exhibition was co-curated by Clockshop as part of the /five initiative at The Huntington and also features the work of poet Robin Coste Lewis and artist Beatriz...

This conference introduces British art and social critic John Ruskin to a modern audience and makes the case for his continuing relevance in our own troubled time.

Joyce Chaplin, James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University, revisits The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which was one of Henry Huntington’s most prized manuscript acquisitions. Franklin tells a tantalizingly open-ended story about his life because the manuscript was left unfinished.

Bill Esparza, author of “L.A. Mexicano: Recipes, People & Places,” and Elisa Callow, author of “The Urban Forager: Culinary Exploring & Eating on L.A.’s Eastside,” join award-winning journalist and L.A. chronicler Val Zavala in a Q&A about L.A. food culture. 

For one hundred years The Huntington has been spreading knowledge like pollen, helping scholarship bloom into exhibitions and publications. Sometimes the right pollen is hard to get though, that’s why it’s good to have friends who can help.

James Brayton Hall, president of the Garden Conservancy, examines what America’s gardens say about our culture and how new approaches pioneered by the Conservancy are helping to protect and document these landscapes for the future. Several examples of West Coast gardens are highlighted, including remarkable successes—such as the gardens surrounding the former prison on Alcatraz Island—and one near failure.

Henry Huntington acquired one of the rarest books in the history of English literature: the so-called “bad quarto” of Hamlet. Zachary Lesser, professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses how this book’s discovery in 1823 transformed our ideas about Hamlet, how it made its way to The Huntington, and what can we learn through this book’s history about modern libraries.