President's Message: Happy New Year

Jan. 11, 2023

At our Centennial launch on Sept. 5, 2019, inaugurating what was to be a yearlong celebration, I welcomed The Huntington community, as well as attendees from other civic, academic, and cultural institutions, and said, “For a person turning 100, it is very natural to look back and reflect on the past. For an institution turning 100, a centennial is a moment to be like the Roman god Janus: looking back and forward at the same time. So today, we celebrate how far we have come and reflect on where we want to go.”

The month of January is named for Janus. As we start a new year, I return to this god of duality—of beginnings and endings, transitions and passages, gates, and frames. The major exhibition of our Centennial, “Nineteen Nineteen,” looked back on The Huntington’s founding in 1919, a tumultuous year both locally and globally, with materials predominantly from our collections. Images on display included a photograph of Pasadena residents wearing masks to protect themselves during the influenza pandemic of 1918. That image, which in the fall of 2019 seemed safely ensconced in the past, proved cruelly prophetic. As we all know, The Huntington shut down about halfway through our Centennial year, like much of the rest of the world. And, suddenly, our own framework for interpreting the historical photo in our exhibition—and our relationship to it—radically changed. Realizing that we ourselves were in a significant historical moment, our photographers documented a Huntington devoid of people, imagining a hypothetical viewer looking back at us 100 years from now.

In On the Genealogy of Morals, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche speaks of the changing nature of historical approaches to the past: “Anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose.” This reinterpretation is crucial to our own Research fellowship program, which plays a central role in our mission. The scholars who come to study these collections don’t just discover a renewable source of energy to fuel their own work (although they do that, too). They also find new ways of reframing and even redirecting the past. As we seek to implement the strategic plan adopted in February 2022, turning our priorities and commitments into reality, one of our major priorities is to magnify the impact of our collections and share them with a wider range of interpreters.

One step in this process occurred in November at The Huntington, when we sponsored and hosted a Research conference called “Imagining Shakespeare in 2050: Performance and Archives.” Just like Janus, this conference looked back 400 years to look forward, asking: “How, when, where, and why will we turn to Shakespeare in 2050?” The Huntington houses one of the world’s great collections of Shakespeare’s works, so it is a fitting place to consider such large, important questions. Organized by Ayanna Thompson of Arizona State University, the conference not only speculated on the future of Shakespeare studies (that might have been enough!) but also of theater and the archives. Professor Thompson’s Verso blog post—“What Is the Future of Shakespeare?”—framed these questions.

The relevance of Shakespeare’s plays today—both to new generations of students studying his work and to contemporary theater audiences—was the topic of the first panel of the conference. Moderated by Shakespearean scholar Ian Smith, who is now in residence at The Huntington as a Research fellow, it featured three directors of Shakespeare companies: Erica Whyman, director of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England; Barry Edelstein, director of The Old Globe in San Diego; and Carl Cofield, associate director of the Classical Theatre of Harlem in New York. These Shakespeareans—who live and breathe Shakespeare—focused on how new productions can mine his brilliance, to resonate deeply with community audiences and to liberate appreciation of his dramatic and literary power from cultural awe and intimidation. They spoke of performing a “living Shakespeare” by creating a space to “unleash emotions hard to navigate in other ways—violence, grief, rage, and a way to see oneself in the works of this most canonical of authors.” They focused on how their productions seek to make Shakespeare into a gateway, or, as Edelstein put it, “a magnet that has brought communities together.” Although this conference was not the first time The Huntington has sought to engage new generations and communities through Shakespeare—in 2015, students from the East Los Angeles Performing Arts Academy at Esteban E. Torres High School performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Huntington—it was a powerful reminder of how our institution can use, examine, and “requisition anew” the extraordinarily rich cultural archives of the past.

Happy New Year!

Karen R. Lawrence, President

ONE HUNTINGTON: Strategic Plan FY 2023–27
“What is the Future of Shakespeare?” by Ayanna Thompson