Mix Architects transforms old Chinese country house into library and teahouse
Located in Gaochun of Nanjing, China, a small fishing village called Jangshan commissioned Mix Architects to meet the basic needs of indigenous people for modern functions and cultural life. The renewal plan proposed by the studio consisted of two parts, namely the renovation of the vacant old homes and the construction of new rural public facilities like a library, a tea pavilion and public toilets. Mix Architects focused the renovation plan on the transformation of the old house. the design retained the external appearance of the rare old houses hoping to emphasize the importance of regional characteristics and cultural heritage. at the same time, disruptive functional replacement and spatial reconstruction of the interior of the building was implemented like a bookcase wrapping a patio and a glass tea pavilion facing the courtyard.
A bird box library (and interesting recommended read) spotted in Crofton Park, London, U.K. by our friend Sarah Benson.
I’ve seen a couple of zine street libraries over the years, but zine world could definitely use more of them.
[Description: Photo of a small, glass-doored wooden cabinet sitting on a wall in a leafy London suburb. Inside, a stack of books. A sign on the glass reads BOOK SWAP and the book ‘I Love Dick’ by Chris Kraus faces out.]
Free Graphic Novels (DC, Marvel, Image, etc), Music, TV shows, and music on HOOPLA.
Free music that you can KEEP onFREEGAL
You are PAYING for all this with your tax money - USE THEM. Most likely systems will have all 3 or 2 out of 3, so if you aren’t sure call your local library’s reference/information desk and how you can get set-up or started.
PROTECT YOUR PUBLIC LIBRARY
A lot of libraries also have KANOPY which includes the criterion collection and a bunch of other Cinematically Important™ type movies, as well as a lot of the great courses/teaching company lectures!
I use all of these services and they offer what they say on the tin: FREE ACCESS to current movies and books, as well as classics. Easy peasy, library squeezy! GO!
Well guys, welcome to our final Huntington Tumblr post (RIP).
These past seven years, we’ve laughed, we’ve cried—we’ve had the time of our lives being a part of this weird and wonderful community. This may be our final post, but there are still plenty of amazing stories that will remain in our archive to explore. Here are a few we recommend:
Please keep in touch with us elsewhere on the interwebs! We’re on Instagram,Facebook, and Twitter.
Henry Gordon Alken, The funeral procession of Arthur Duke of Wellington, hand-colored panoramic view, twenty-eight double leaves joined and folded accordion fashion. Dated March 1, 1853. Includes one admission ticket to the funeral (for “a lady”). Select pages gif’d by The Huntington.
Illustrations from a 1933 French edition of Homer’s “Odyssey” from our library collections. The artist, François-Louis Schmied, first painted the compositions before they were reproduced into woodcuts and colored.
Opening this Saturday, Nov. 9: exhibition Beside the Edge of the World began with a treasured book in The Huntington’s collections: a first edition of Thomas More’s Utopia, printed in 1516. This 500-year-old text served as a jumping-off point for the fourth year of /five, The Huntington’s contemporary arts initiative, in partnership with Los Angeles arts organization Clockshop.
Three artists and two writers were invited to consider More’s classic work as they explored The Huntington’s collections. The process of discovery started with ideas of mapping borders and edges, temporarily forgotten histories, peoples whose lives had been carefully recorded—and then forgotten—and utopian experiments in communal living. Many of these places and the people who challenged the dominant narratives of history existed on the periphery.
Read more about each project below:
ArtistNina Katchadourian’s work Strange Creature was inspired by The Huntington’s collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps and books, as well as the ancient Chinese mythological text Shan Hai Jing(Guideways through Mountains and Seas). The myriad of creatures depicted in these ancient texts offered a challenge: How much have we really seen of the world, and how well do we know it? Katchadourian imagined a creature, somewhat familiar but also strange, slowly surfacing from our own Chinese Garden’s Lake of Reflected Fragrance. Her installation suggests that there is more around us than we can see or perceive—literally, and perhaps also in an otherworldly sense. See if you can catch a glimpse of her creation in the Chinese Garden.
WriterRobin Coste Lewis was inspired by a particular passage in Henry David Thoreau’s canonical Walden; or, Life in the Woods. In a chapter titled “Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors,” Thoreau describes the community of free Blacks that had been living around Walden Pond long before Thoreau arrived. For Lewis, this passage contained a hidden call to the rediscovery of African American histories woven into the story of Concord, Massachusetts, and hence, America. In order to extend Thoreau’s experiment, she omitted much of the chapter’s text and rearranged the remaining lines to emphasize, lyrically, the free Black community that had once called the woods home.
Artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s film Laurel Sabino y Jagüilla takes its title from a species native to the artist’s birthplace and home on the island of Puerto Rico, a flowering plant now endangered by logging and wood harvesting. Magnolia is an ancient genus, dating back 20 million years; its family, Magnoliaceae, has survived ice ages, mountain formation, and continental drift. Filmed in the rain forest of Puerto Rico and in the gardens of The Huntington, the work imagines the relationship of Magnolia splendens to utopia, photography, soil, vision, and time.
Writer Dana Johnson’s short story Our Endless Ongoing reimagines the life of Delilah Beasley in early twentieth-century California. Delilah Leontium Beasley (1871–1934), an American historian and columnist for the Oakland Tribune, was one of the first African American women to be published regularly in a major metropolitan newspaper. She also became the first person to document the overlooked but significant history of California’s Black pioneers, in her book The Negro Trail-Blazers of California (1919), published the same year as the founding of The Huntington.
Artist Rosten Woo created Another World Lies Beyond as a series of interrelated stories told through audio, projection, and artifact, installed in the gallery and in the gardens to invite contemplation and political reflection. The narrative through-line is the life and work of Robert V. Hine (1921–2015), a scholar of California utopian communities whose papers are housed at The Huntington. Each audio story offers a glimpse of an idea of the perfect state and the world just beyond it. Additionally, a short animated film by Woo brings together all the illustrations from John Russell Bartlett’s failed 1857 survey of the U.S.–Mexico border, included in the Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey.
images:
Nina Katchadourian looks at maps from Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World) by Abraham Ortelius, ca. 1606. Photo by Kate Lain.
Nina Katchadourian (b. 1968), Study for “Strange Creature,” 2019. Watercolor, pencil, gouache on paper. Courtesy of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, and Pace Gallery.
Robin Coste Lewis (b. 1964), excerpt from poetry chapbook Inhabitants and Visitors, Los Angeles, Clockshop, 2019.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz filming in The Huntington’s gardens. The Huntington. Photo by Kate Lain.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (b. 1972), film still from Laurel Sabino y Jagüilla, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
Dana Johnson at The Huntington. Photo by Kate Lain.
Dana Johnson (b. 1967), “Our Endless Ongoing” featured in Trailblazer: Delilah Beasley’s California, Los Angeles, Clockshop, 2019.
Rosten Woo at The Huntington. Photo by Kate Lain.
Rosten Woo (b. 1977), excerpt from Another World Lies Beyond, 2019.
Support for this exhibition is provided by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation, the Pasadena Art Alliance, and WHH Foundation.
Beside the Edge of the World is a Huntington Centennial Exhibition. The Huntington’s Centennial Celebration is made possible by the generous support of Avery and Andrew Barth, Terri and Jerry Kohl, and Lisa and Tim Sloan.
“In looking through the collection, I was interested in boundaries, including political boundaries, and the kinds of practical and theoretical problems they bring up…For a good 50 years after the U.S.-Mexico boundary was drawn, they had to redraw the line every three years and set markers along it, though now it’s pretty clearly delineated and militarized. So, it’s really easy to draw the line but really complicated to make it mean something.”
Read more from Rosten Woo, one of our 2019 #5atTheH artists, as he examines ideas of perfection through the lens of Thomas More’s “Utopia,” early utopian settlements in California, and drawings from an expedition marking the U.S.-Mexico border.
One of Woo’s contribution’s to the upcoming /five exhibition, “Utopia In Out Over Through,” consists of five audio tours that bridge The Huntington’s garden and gallery and focus on the archive of historian Robert Hine. Rosten’s audio tour takes listeners through stories from Hine’s research: to the U.S.-Mexico border; to Kaweah Colony, a utopian commune in Northern California; and into the Chinese Garden.
Did you know some books contain hidden images? Fore-edge painting, or decorating the closed leaves of a book, first began in the 11th century; but it wasn’t until the 17th century that the practice of a “disappearing” fore-edged painting began. Artists painted the inside edges of a book’s pages so that the image would only be seen when the pages were fanned in a certain direction. Above are some lovely examples found in our library archives.
images:
[1-4] Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), “The Divine Comedy,” 1854. London: Chapman and Hall. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
[5] William Falconer (1732-1769), “The Poetical Works of William Falconer,” 1836. London: William Pickering. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
[6-7] John Milton (1608-1674), “Paradise Lost,” 1776. Glasgow: Printed by Robert and Andrew Foulis printers to the University. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
[8] View of all three books closed, without the hidden illustrations visible. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
Coming this fall: a massive centennial exhibition centered on 1919, the year of our founding.
A tumultuous time in our nation’s history, “Nineteen Nineteen” will tell the story of a year in which soldiers returned from World War I, African Americans faced violence during the “Red Summer,” women fought for the right to vote, and cripplingly high inflation sparked labor unrest.
The show will feature approximately 275 objects from across The Huntington’s collections, each made, published, edited, exhibited, or acquired in 1919.
Nineteen Nineteen (2019) by James Glisson and Jennifer Watts. Book to complement the exhibition. Published by The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Available Aug. 21, 2019.
On this day in 1869, the eastbound and westbound railroad tracks met at Utah’s Promontory Summit, marking the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Though it remains a monumental moment in history, many Americans felt the railroad created a new empire, ruled by “masters of the iron horse rather than the people.”
Stereotyping in early modern England and its colonies deserves scrutiny in our time because stereotypes were pervasive and affected the unfolding of profound events in the past as they still do today.
Recent events influenced by stereotyping include the two major political upheavals of 2016: the British referendum on membership in the European Union, and the American presidential election that vaulted a real estate tycoon with no prior experience in political office into the White House. In both cases, competing camps—including self-styled defenders of progressive values—stereotyped their opponents as unacceptable parties perpetrating great wrongs. A wide range of stereotypes were mobilized to orchestrate support and attack opponents—stereotypes of immigrants, African Americans, incompetent bureaucrats, metropolitan elites, and autocrats.
The political commentator Walter Lipmann (1899–1974), who coined the term “stereotype,” considered stereotyping an essentially modern phenomenon—modern in that its diffusion and impact supposedly rested on a range of contemporary mass media and large, literate audiences. This view becomes unsustainable as soon as we turn our attention to early modern history.
It’s 2019, and we’ve got five brand new artists-in-residence at The Huntington! Dana Johnson, Nina Katchadourian, Robin Coste Lewis, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Rosten Woo will all be creating new work inspired by our collections, focused around the theme of “utopia.”
Nina Katchadourian has been searching for monsters in the Library—in medical texts, ancient maps, and rare books.
Her interest in the subject stems from the idea that “Monsters quite readily make people think, fearfully and somewhat negatively, of unknowns, or of the unknowable—things that, in the way they seem different from what we think we are and what we think we know, are ultimately threatening. However, I am more interested in monsters as a catalyst for the imagination, as a kind of prompt that may help us to think—hopefully—about what we still don’t know and what may not be as fixed as we think it is.”
PoetRobin Coste Lewis has been researching John James Audubon’s life and work, with a specific focus on the landscapes and homes he depicted in the backgrounds of his illustrations.
WriterDana Johnson has been researching the work of Delilah Beasley, a historian and news columnist who wrote about black pioneers in her book “Negro Trail-Blazers of California.”Johnson is also interested in the historic black community Allensworth, a California town founded in 1908.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz has been exploring the plant cryopreservation lab at The Huntington, as she is interested in the implications of creating a "Noah’s Ark” of seeds. Working with botanical curators, her focus has been on the preservation of Magnolia splendensandportoricensus, two tree species that are endangered. Both are trees are native to Puerto Rico, where Muñoz is from.
Muñoz has also spent time filming in the themed, manicured gardens of The Huntington, a contrast to the native habitats of her homeland.
Rosten Woo has been researching the papers of Robert Hine, a scholar of the American West whose research focused on early utopian settlements in California. He has also been studying landscapes produced during an expedition led by John Russell Bartlett. Bartlett was hired to draw the border between Mexico and the U.S. after the Mexican American War in 1846.
Woo is interested in how these communities were formed and funded, and in exploring the relationships between “utopias” and the outside world
The Huntington is collaborating with Clockshop for the fourth year of our contemporary arts initiative /five. The project will culminate in an exhibition that opens in November 2019.
Images:
Nina Katchadourian looking at maps from “Theatrum Orbis Terrarum,” (“Theatre of the World”) by Abraham Ortelius, ca. 1606. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
John James #Audubon, detail from “Birds of America,” 1827–38. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
Frontispiece of #DelilahBeasley’s “Negro Trail-Blazers of California,” 1919. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz filming in The Huntington’s cryopreservation lab and gardens.
Rosten Woo looking at materials from the Robert Hine and John Rusell Bartlett papers.
Did You Know? If you hang out in the library for a few minutes after the Enchanted Tales with Belle show ends, the crew will explain some of their technical tricks, like bringing the character of Lumiere to life.
