Huntington Verso

Inspired by the dazzling array of birds that add beauty and wonder throughout the Huntington gardens, staff member Harrison Hyatt created an interactive map that highlights commonly seen bird species and some of the plants they frequent. His goal is to enhance the Huntington experience by fostering connections with wildlife.

Historians long thought the Qing dynasty was arrogant, xenophobic, and closed to the world. If it had been more open, they argued, China would have been able to counter the Western advance. Recently, however, scholars have shown that the Qing were far more cosmopolitan, open, and connected than once believed.

Before Eve Babitz became a published writer, she was a visual artist, and her chosen medium was collage. Inspired by Joseph Cornell and Andy Warhol, she created the album cover art for Buffalo Springfield’s “Buffalo Springfield Again” and The Byrds’ “Untitled.”

To celebrate this year’s Founders’ Day, Lori Bettison-Varga, president and director of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, engaged in a wide-ranging conversation with Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence about the past, present, and future of The Huntington.

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.

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.

Lois Rosson, The Huntington’s 2023–24 Octavia E. Butler Fellow, discusses her experience at NASA, her study of astronomical illustrations as extensions of the frontier West, and Butler’s alternative vision of space.

American artist R.B. Kitaj, one of the major figures in the London art scene of the 1960s, loved books not only for their contents but as tangible objects. Kitaj created an imagined library in screen prints, which is on display in the Huntington Art Gallery through March 4, 2024.

While examining and treating Edward Hopper’s iconic painting “The Long Leg,” Christina M. O’Connell, the Mary Ann and John Sturgeon Senior Paintings Conservator at The Huntington, discovered something that others have overlooked.

The custom of using an eye-catching greeting card to convey good wishes is a time-honored tradition, one exceptional chapter of which can be found in The Huntington’s archives.