Watch, Read, Listen

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 loss.

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 1854. Wilkie shares the story, opportunities, and dilemmas of caring for the 15th-century illuminated manuscript many scholars believe Mary Queen of Scots carried to her execution. Claudia Funke, Avery Chief Curator of the Library, moderates the post-presentation discussion and takes questions from the audience.

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 and essayist. She is the author of three books of nonfiction including After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame. She began working in the Octavia E. Butler archive at The Huntington soon after it opened for research. Through the objects and documents in the archive, she came to know and identify with the renowned Black author who grew up not far from where George lives in Pasadena.

Images from the Octavia E. Butler archive shown with permission from the Butler estate.

Lynell George’s  A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler is available in the Huntington Store.