Campaign News

President's Message:  May - June 2007

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"The Breadth and Depth
of Exhibitions"

The Huntington’s recent exhibition, “Constable’s Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings,” provided an unprecedented opportunity for West Coast audiences to view the masterworks of the acclaimed British artist. The institution’s most ambitious international show ever, it has resonated deeply with both visitors and critics. In his review, Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “The six-footers are important to see and understand because of their extraordinary capacity to articulate a robust worldview, and effectively establish it.”

In light of the exhibition’s success, I’d like to reflect on the purpose of all Huntington exhibitions, whether they involve art, library, or botanical materials.

Always rooted in education and research, our exhibitions and their intellectual breadth are predicated on the expertise of our curators or guest curators and their ability to showcase our tremendous collections in imaginative ways. They work hard to introduce public audiences— including thousands of schoolchildren each year—to worlds they might not ever encounter. By way of their exhibitions, curators are also making scholarly contributions to ongoing research dialogues.

For instance, the exhibition “Legacy and Legend: Images of Indians from Four Centuries,” opening June 9, carefully documents how Europeans and Americans have depicted North American Indians in art. As frontier artists interpreted what they had seen, creating works for a non-Indian market, they inevitably distorted perceptions of Indian life. Drawn almost entirely from Huntington collections, which in this area boast a stunning array of historically important images, the exhibition makes an important contribution to the scholarly discourse on how the public’s understanding of Native American culture has been shaped.

The Huntington’s commitment to increasing public access to the collections has led to an expansion of the exhibitions program over the years at a stunning rate unmatched in our institutional history. The transformation in 1999 of Mr. Huntington’s garage into the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery was critical to this growth, as previously we had limited gallery space for changing exhibitions. When the renovated Huntington Gallery reopens in 2008 with the reinstallation of its British and Continental art, the American art collections will then occupy both the Virginia Steele Scott and Lois and Robert F. Erburu galleries, presenting even greater opportunities for us to mount special shows drawn from our collections, as well as materials on loan from outside collections.

A small exhibition in the Botanical Center, “Linnaeus in the Garden,” illustrates The Huntington’s incredible ability to make connections that cut across the collections in intellectually stimulating ways. Viewing rare botanical books about the man who developed the modern system for classifying plants, visitors can see firsthand how the Linnaean system is implemented in the gardens. Last fall during the Frederic Church exhibition, “Treasures from Olana,” we used our painting Chimborazo to explore the history of science, supplementing the show with material on naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, whose South America exploration had inspired Church.

What is especially remarkable about our exhibitions is that the institution has long been challenged by funding needs—the costs associated with special exhibitions are not incorporated into our annual operating budget; thus we must raise every dollar we spend on each special exhibition, a cost that can often run to six figures. Endowing the cost of mounting special exhibitions is one of the institution’s annual restricted needs included within our Campaign fundraising goals. Meeting this goal will allow us to develop our active exhibitions program even further and bring greater support to the intellectual exploration of our collections by our curators.

Steve Koblik, President