Watch, Read, Listen

Alison Hirsch, associate professor at USC and the Shapiro Center for American History and Culture Fellow, discusses the history and future of Tulare Lake, which reemerged after multiple atmospheric rivers hit California in March 2023.

In 1876, Edward Mitchell Bannister became the first African American artist to win a national award. The Huntington’s Lauren Cross writes about what motivated him, whom he credited for his success, and how he shifted from being a portraitist to a landscape artist.

Charles Elachi, the former director of NASA and Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, talked with Huntington President Karen Lawrence about the importance of daring to take risks, environmental stewardship, and the mutually enriching interactions among the arts, humanities, and sciences.

In the spring of 2022, Tongva photographer Mercedes Dorame peered down at a tide pool on Santa Cruz Island, roughly 25 miles off the coast of California. Focusing her camera, she captured an image that provides a window into worlds.

Contemporary voices in the exhibition "Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis" bring forward questions of environmental history to the present.

Un libro del siglo XIX sobre las orquídeas de Latinoamérica evoca una reflexión personal sobre la vulnerabilidad y la resiliencia de las plantas, el arte de la ilustración botánica y la poderosa función de los retratos como huellas perdurables de la memoria cultural.

A 19th-century book on Latin American orchids prompts a personal reflection on the vulnerability and resiliency of plants, the art of botanical illustration, and the power of portraits as markers of cultural memory.

Artist, designer, and UCLA professor Rebeca Méndez discusses her work Any-Instant-Whatever (2020), which is featured in “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis

“Don Bachardy: A Life in Portraits” will feature more than 100 works of art and archival materials spanning over 70 years.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, an obsession spread among bibliophiles for extra-illustrating or grangerizing books. Readers would supplement the pages of an already published book by inserting prints and related materials acquired from other sources. This process would often result in a huge expansion of the original volume.

When Velasco’s painting arrived at The Huntington, a few lines of printed text could be seen at the bottom of the work. Infrared reflectography, a process that can detect layers of detail not visible to the naked eye, has revealed what lies beneath the painting’s surface.

The exhibitions “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis” and “Growing and Knowing in the Gardens of China” trace the dovetailing histories of the relationship between humans and the environment and emphasize the significant role that close observation has played in art, science, and ethics.