Image: Martin Johnson Heade, Haystacks, ca. 1876–82. Oil on canvas, 28 x 54 in. Gift of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
‘Borderlands’, the long-running installation of The Huntington’s American art collection, remains on view in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art in San Marino, California. Opened in November 2021 and scheduled to run until November 2036, it is presented as a series of rotating installations that bring historical holdings together with contributions from contemporary artists.
The galleries take borders as their organising idea, whether geographic, political, social, linguistic or personal, and explore the relationship between art and land, including the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. They draw on The Huntington’s library, art and botanical collections.
The installation is arranged in several sections. One gallery presents modern and contemporary works by Asian American artists alongside Robert Rauschenberg and Sam Francis, whose work was shaped by travel across the Pacific. ‘Space Cowboys’ gathers works inspired by built and natural environments, including the American West, among them Donald Judd’s blue Plexiglas stacks. ‘Crossing Borders’ brings together landscape painters of the Americas with a display of John James Audubon’s ‘The Birds of America’ (1827–38), while ‘Americans Abroad’ looks at 19th-century American artists who worked in Europe. An education space, ‘Art and Color’, draws on the work of Sandy Rodriguez to examine pigments from botanical, mineral and animal sources, with names given in Tongva, Nahua, Spanish and English.
Works on view include Martin Johnson Heade’s ‘Haystacks’ (ca. 1876–82), Mary Cassatt’s ‘Breakfast in Bed’ (1897), Helen Lundeberg’s ‘Irises (The Sentinels)’ (1936), Arthur Dove’s ‘Lattice and Awning’ (1941) and Dominique Fung’s ‘Sans Les Mains’ (2022).
Several contemporary projects currently sit within or alongside the galleries. Betye Saar’s commissioned installation ‘Drifting Toward Twilight’ continues until November 2027, and ‘Laura Aguilar: Day of the Dead’, the second rotation of Aguilar’s self-portraits in the landscape, opened in September and runs until 1 March 2027. ‘Sandy Rodriguez: Book 13’, her largest work to date, is on view until April 2027, and Mercedes Dorame’s ‘Deliquescence: Sites of Transformation’, with archival and contemporary photography and a soundscape of Tongva poetry, continues until March 2029.
