Watch, Read, Listen

Lonnie G. Bunch III, 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, joins Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence and Huntington Governor Robert C. Davidson Jr. in a conversation about why museums and collecting institutions matter, what they have to offer to contemporary social and racial justice movements, and what it means to lead a museum in the current moment.

Celebrating The Huntington’s unparalleled opportunities for cross-disciplinary exploration of human culture and history, the Why It Matters series features Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence in conversation with distinguished guests about the enduring relevance of the humanities.

Chinese American composer Nathan Wang, the 2022-23 Cheng Family Foundation Visiting Artist in the Chinese Garden, will introduce his remarkable career and the development of the opera “On Gold Mountain” in collaboration with renowned author Lisa See. The evening will feature highlights from the upcoming performance of “On Gold Mountain” by LA Opera at The Huntington.

Robert Flynn Johnson, curator emeritus of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, discusses how Don Bachardy was one of the most insightful draftsmen of his era.

Most artists work in isolation, inventing their art from pure imagination or being inspired by landscapes or inanimate objects. If they derive their art from human beings, it is often from numerous sessions with live models when they have the luxury of time. Not so with Don Bachardy, who always created his works from life in single intense sessions of between two to three hours. This method meant that each drawing was a true collaboration between artist and subject. Unlike other artists, this demanded not just skill but the necessary elements of diplomacy in making willing subjects comfortable while, at the same time, putting himself, by choice, into the pressure of completing the work with the extreme economy of time.

This is the Isherwood-Bachardy Lecture.

An exhibition centered around Joseph Wright of Derby’s masterpiece “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” becomes a starting point to examine how witnessing experiments with air pumps were critically important for the transfer of scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment and after.

Featuring Otto von Guericke’s 1672 publication “Experimenta nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de vacuo spatio”

Produced for the exhibition “Science and the Sublime: A Masterpiece by Joseph Wright of Derby”

Tita Chico, professor at the University of Maryland, explores how the concept of wonder during the eighteenth century helps us to see the imaginative underpinnings of how we come to understand the natural world and its various phenomena. Through this lecture, she reveals how feeling played a constitutive role in the formulation of Enlightenment rationalization.

The eighteenth century was populated with fantastical wonders where the moon could bleed; a tree could moan and also amble about the countryside; a little boy could have Latin and Hebrew etched in the whites of his eyes; one woman infected with smallpox could find that her legs self-amputate and another could give birth to seventeen rabbits; and people in the North of England lived up to 140 years. These wonders illustrate a co-mingling of divine portents and scientific facts, contradictory and yet concurrent ways of understanding the natural world, and a myriad of social connections that give these interpretations their value.

This is the Dibner Lecture in the History of Science and Technology.