Watch, Read, Listen

This exhibition displays 24 objects and a participatory artwork highlighting how historical Chinese gardens have served as spaces that not only delight the senses and nourish the body but also inspire the mind—both intellectually and spiritually.

California natives add a regional flair to gardens and also support local wildlife; many birds and pollinators prefer native plants, and some depend exclusively on them. Native plants fit a variety of garden niches, from spectacular specimen trees to ground covers, vines, and colorful annuals.

An exploration of photography’s ecological dimensions provides an opportunity to reexamine the role that photography has played in documentation as well as environmental degradation. By examining photographs other than those of classic Western landscapes, we reconsider how Indigenous persons and settlers perceived and interacted with the environment.

Mizuno's site-specific sculpture “Homage to Nature” debuts on May 25, 2024.

During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s, California was an important site of African American creativity, even in the face of intense discrimination. Black enclaves emerged as places where African American leaders, activists, writers, performers, and visual artists could build community and make professional connections.

Centuries before the pop song, love sonnets provided the thrill of peeking into another’s romantic experience. Petrarch’s poems about his adoration of a woman named Laura still impacts how we talk about love today and spawned an early kind of fan fiction that swept the Renaissance reading public.

In this lecture video, David Roediger, professor of history at the University of Kansas and 2024's R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow, considers the circumstances and limits of Robinson Crusoe’s Friday character and what it says about the history of race.

The Huntington’s Edward Davis Townsend collection contained something rather curious: a spool of thread with a note hidden inside that shed new light on the dramatic events that unfolded shortly after the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860.