The Huntington will celebrate the United States' 250th anniversary with 'This Land Is...,' a retrospective exhibition that examines American identities over time.
The Huntington’s new exhibit “This Land Is…” anchors America’s 250th birthday in the ground beneath our feet, using land as a lens on promise, struggle and belonging.
Including Woody Guthrie’s “This Machine Kills Fascists” guitar, a haunting Gettysburg photograph, and a seed-filled Civil War letter, artifacts on display pair devastation with intimate reminders of home and resistance. A splintered Pasadena oak, Japanese American flower farmers, Colorado River maps and a vivid Haitian Revolution mural recast independence stories from a West Coast vantage point, revealing whose claims to land endured — and whose didn’t.
A cross section of a 250-year-old Pasadena oak tree that was uprooted in a 1993 windstorm is among the first things visitors will see upon entering the Huntington’s new exhibit, “This Land Is…” Jagged cracks in the trunk, which was once rooted in the Huntington’s lawn, are feebly held together by wooden joints. It’s a fitting emblem of what’s to come in a long-planned show curated to coincide with the country’s upcoming semiquincentennial, and crafted to pose land itself as central to the country’s complex past.
After taking in the exhibit, attendees can draw their own conclusions about the land’s role as aOn a recent late afternoon, the Pasadena sun drilled down on the facade of the Huntington’s MaryLou and George Boone Gallery, where the show’s organizers waited beside four chiseled columns with their hands tucked behind their backs, swaying in anticipation.
“It’s the first time anyone is seeing it,” said Linde B. Lehtinen, the museum’s senior curator of photography. Joining her are Josh Garrett-Davis, curator of Western American history, and Armando Pulido, assistant curator for special projects. All three smile with excitement. For the better part of the last two and a half years, Lehtinen and Garrett-Davis have spearheaded the curation of “This Land Is…,” which opens Sunday and runs through early next year.
For them the fallen oak tree represents hope amid disturbance: Another once-towering elder on the museum’s North Vista was uprooted during a windstorm in 2025 — one of its acorns has since sprouted and now stands more than 6-feet tall. Still, it only brushes the surface of an exhibition that seamlessly draws upon a plethora of works crafted across U.S. history. Want to plan a visit? Here are five things you shouldn’t miss seeing.
Woody Guthrie’s guitar, inscribed with ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ In 1940, Woody Guthrie sat in a Midtown Manhattan hotel, toiling over lyrics for what would become “This Land Is Your Land. ” Today, it’s been adopted as a quasi-anthem for the U.S. and the epitome of American progressivism. For this exhibition, the museum acquired Guthrie’s C.F. Martin and Co. guitar, a seamless blend of spruce, mahogany, celluloid, ebony and mother-of-pearl.
On its back, a carved inscription reads, “This Machine Kills Fascists. ” “The idea for ‘This Land Is…’ emerged … because the scope and breadth of his voice in terms of his activism and how prolific he was … and thinking about how he reflected on and experienced American land,” Lehtinen said.
Alongside the guitar is a copy of the Declaration of Independence, annotated by John McKesson, secretary of New York’s Fourth Provincial Congress, in the days following July 4, 1776. According to Lehtinen, the two objects were paired as instruments of protest and change.
“We talked to granddaughter Anna Canoni, and she said to us at one point that he used guitars like pens or tools, and that was so appropriate to how we were thinking about its relationship to this document,” she added. For more than 30 years after opening, the Huntington held the best art collection in the L.A. suburbs. With new additions, the museum continues to build its impressive collection of masterpieces.
Japanese flower farmers photographed before, during and after internment Not far from the Guthrie guitar is a panoramic portrait of the Kuromi family, posing amid a flower farm that stood where Los Feliz Boulevard is now. To its right is a watercolor painting of the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona, where many members of the family were forcibly transported to and imprisoned during World War II.
“I was looking at a historic preservation report, and the name was the same as my mechanic in Los Feliz,” Garrett-Davis said. “The next time I went to get my oil changed, I took a printout of that panorama and was going to show it to them and ask, ‘Do you know anything about this? Is this related? ’ “I walked into their office, and a copy of that photo had been on their wall for years.
In 10 years, I had never noticed it,” he said with a laugh. After their internment, the Kuromi family returned to their farm in 1945 to find their equipment stolen. The process of regaining access to their land was slow, but they eventually settled back in, and operated the farm until losing their lease in 1961.
One of the most grotesque displays on view is an albumen print of an 1863 photo titled “A Harvest of Death,” taken by Timothy H. O’Sullivan after the Battle of Gettysburg. Within its frame lies the bodies of fallen soldiers, sprawled out and lifeless on the grass.
“That evocative title signals some of the other things that we have been thinking about, whether it’s looking at gardens or loss … in this case, these are bodies that have been left, and they’re decomposing,” Lehtinen said. Paired with the print is a letter from a young woman named Harriet Bailey to her uncle on the front lines of the Civil War, containing seeds delicately etched with drawings of a ship, facesand a dog.
The two pieces represent a stark contrast in experiences during the same conflict, once again touching upon the theme of hope amid disturbance.
“This is a remnant of home that he’s actually being sent while on the battlefield,” she continued. “So, the joy and lightness to what is an incredibly somber moment in American history. ” “Archiving the Watershed” is a collection of artifacts from the Colorado River assembled by Otis R. “Dock” Marston on display.
Oct. 20, 2023This display is described as a “tiny slice” of the Huntington’s archive on Otis Reed “Dock” Marston, a historian and river runner who made it his life’s goal to collect information on the Colorado River. According to Garrett-Davis, Marston had around 185 binders full of photographs, often placed on a cut-out map of where they were taken and organized mile-by-mile, from below the U.S.-Mexico border all the way into Utah.
This taps into a focal point of the exhibition: adapting it to a West Coast perspective. In this way, the idea of independence is viewed expansively as it unfolds across time and place.
“The Huntington has a wonderful collection of presidential papers and documents relating to the Colonial era, but we also have materials on California … from the lens of the West,” said Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence. “We can show the West’s visual culture at the same time that we can show the original copies of the Declaration of Independence … we have a breadth that’s quite rare.
”The Haitian Revolution may seem out of place in an exhibition celebrating the U.S., but Haiti was the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere. Its independence from the French was proclaimed in 1804, just two decades after the American colonies signed the Treaty of Paris. In the mural “Troubled Island,” Noni Olabisi chronicles the Haitian struggle for independence, including how suffering under French colonists led to the 1791 slave rebellion.
The piece was first painted for the William Grant Still Arts Center in West Adams in 2003, referencing an opera of the same name. The opera was composed by Still with a libretto from the Missouri-born poet, playwright, novelist and social activist Langston Hughes, who connected Haiti’s struggle for freedom to his home country’s.
“We wanted to focus on parts that might seem peripheral but are actually quite central to American history,” Garrett-Davis said. Julius Miller is an editorial assistant at the Los Angeles Times. Previously, he worked as an associate editor and staff writer for Los Angeles Magazine. When he’s not aiding the newsroom, he’s spinning vinyl records or hanging out with his cat, Saoirse.
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