News Release - Two Consecutive Exhibitions Highlight Library Acquisitions in the 21st Century

"What Now: Collecting for the Library in the 21st Century"

Part 1: Oct. 19, 2019–Feb. 17, 2020 | Part 2: May 2–Aug. 24, 2020

SAN MARINO, Calif.—As part of its yearlong Centennial Celebration, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens presents a two-part exhibition that invites visitors to consider the continued relevance of the Library's role in documenting the human experience.

The more than 100 items in "What Now: Collecting for the Library in the 21st Century" highlight the power of objects to reveal the past and construct new histories and narratives. Part 1 of "What Now" will run from Oct. 19, 2019 to Feb. 17, 2020, and Part 2 from May 2 to Aug. 24, 2020, in the West Hall of the Library building.

The carefully chosen materials in "What Now" provide a window into the ever-growing cultural heritage available at The Huntington and confirm the Library's significance as a major destination for knowledge making and intellectual discovery in the 21st century. New resources speak to contemporary areas of scholarly inquiry, including environmental history, borderlands studies, radicalism and dissent, the human body, sensory experience, literary expression, military history, and material culture.

Among the oldest works on view will be a Middle English manuscript of one of the foundational texts of travel literature, "The Book of John Mandeville," from the second half of the 15th century. The most recent works on display will be large-scale archival inkjet botanical prints from 2009, created with a flatbed scanner by California artist Jane O'Neal. All works in the exhibition have been acquired by The Huntington in the 21st century.

"The objects in 'What Now' are curators' choices to reveal how The Huntington continues to expand its holdings for humanities scholarship," said Claudia Funke, Avery Chief Curator and Associate Director of Library Collections, and exhibition cocurator. "They also demonstrate the types of materials that we value as we seek to preserve documentary and artistic creation for future generations."

Visitors are encouraged—through the juxtaposition of books, manuscripts, maps, prints, and photographs—to explore and reconceptualize existing strengths across the Library's core subjects and geographies, which include North America, the Pacific Rim, the Atlantic World, and Europe.

Commonalities in the wide array of items to be shown suggested the eight themes into which exhibition objects are organized. These, in turn, logically matched up to form four pairs: "Love and Conflict," "Numbers and Secrets," "Landscape and Migrations," and "Materiality and Process." "Objects from different locations and times are placed in conversation within and across these broad and fundamental themes, which are intended to be provocative and not determinative or restrictive," noted Funke.