Huntington Verso

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.

The Huntington is a place of wonder, beauty, and intellectual engagement. With the following selection of Verso posts, we invite you to revisit some of The Huntington’s 2023 highlights.

Brooke Palmieri, the inaugural writer-in-residence at The Huntington, examines traces of queer history as a way of building a wider understanding about the relationship between what survives from the past and how that information is or is not incorporated into our sense of history.

The Huntington conference “Correspondence and Embodiment: The Bluestocking Corpus Online,” organized in collaboration with the Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online project, will investigate new questions deriving from the recent digitization of The Huntington’s Elizabeth Montagu Papers.

The extensive Los Angeles Area Court Records offer researchers invaluable evidence of everyday contestations over sexuality and gender relations in early California, the blurring of lines between sexual consent and coercion, and abuses of women whose economic survival was at stake.

Photographer William Camargo has a talent for transporting the viewer to a precise moment in time, often delivering a jarring history lesson in the process. His series Origins and Displacements amplifies issues of gentrification and the invisible labor in his hometown of Anaheim, California.

There are more than 70 daguerreotypes in The Huntington’s collection, each with stories as unique as the daguerreotype process itself. These miniature portals into 19th-century life preserve vital histories and allow viewers to engage in their own contact with the past.

The academic conference “Maritime History from Below: Rethinking Societies and the Sea” (Nov. 3–4) offers new stories of humankind’s relationship to the sea, including the experiences of sailors, transported prisoners, enslaved people, and Indigenous Americans.

Hilton Als joined Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence in a conversation about his career as a critic and curator, the relationship between visual and textual forms, and the endless inspiration found in The Huntington’s collections.

Vincent Lugo, whose family papers are at The Huntington, helped build the beloved La Laguna de San Gabriel playground, also known as “Monster Park.” The so-called monsters are play sculptures of an octopus called Ozzie, a whale known as Minnie, and a starfish named Stella, among other smiling sea creatures.

Art exhibitions in the late 18th and early 19th centuries created rich immersive environments of fine art working in tandem with other media, which today can seem like a bewildering jumble. The Huntington’s “Paintings, Peepshows, and Porcupines” conference will begin to make sense of this apparent chaos.

With the aim of engaging a more diverse cross section of people, The Huntington created the Meet Me in the Garden program as a way of welcoming visitors with different sensory needs. The program is geared toward families with members who identify as disabled, but all guests can participate.