SAN MARINO, CA.- The Huntington’s exhibition “This Land Is …” explores how land—claimed, cultivated, and contested—has shaped American life from before 1776 to the present.

The exhibition’s title references the iconic 1940s song “This Land Is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie, with the ellipsis inviting reflection on the American project and land as both a geographical and metaphorical space of promise, struggle, and belonging.

Moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from precolonial America to the 21st century, the exhibition presents multiple perspectives addressing such topics as opportunity and dispossession, mapping and ecology, and preservation and repair. A wide range of voices from the past and present—across distant geographies—come together through documents, artworks, and artifacts to tell a multilayered story.

“The Huntington Library is one of the nation’s leading repositories for historical Americana, from presidential and Colonial–era archives to materials on California and the West,” said Sandra Brooke Gordon, Avery Director of the Library. “With these extraordinarily deep and broad collections, The Huntington is uniquely positioned to tell American stories, bringing forward disparate historic voices to enlighten the national conversation.”

The exhibition features maps, photographs, posters, manuscripts, artworks, audiovisual materials, rare books, and more to offer a moving and multifaceted story of American lands and peoples.

Cocurated by Josh Garrett-Davis, the H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western American History, and Linde B. Lehtinen, the Philip D. Nathanson Senior Curator of Photography, the exhibition’s highlights include:

• Two rare, annotated July 1776 printings of the Declaration of Independence

• Unique documents from the history of surveying American lands, including a hand-drawn survey of Mount Vernon by George Washington and a hand-drawn design for a garden at Monticello by Thomas Jefferson, as well as a rare map of the 1760s survey of the Mason-Dixon Line and a manuscript page from Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon





• Documents related to Colonial Pennsylvania’s swindle of more than a million acres of Delaware/Lenape land in the infamous Walking Purchase

• Literary evocations of land in manuscripts by Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Octavia E. Butler

• A 1936 acoustic guitar owned by itinerant songwriter and activist Woody Guthrie and inscribed with the words “This Machine Kills Fascists,” courtesy of the Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle, Washington

• Drawings, journal pages, and a painting of George Washington made by Woody Guthrie, courtesy of the Woody Guthrie Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma

• Explorations of the U.S.-Mexico border from a survey after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to present-day art and political contestation

• Civil War and Reconstruction–era materials including photography, personal writings, and a Congressional resolution to pass the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery

• Depictions of the national park system from its origins to the present

• Family photographs and documents by Japanese American flower farmers in Los Angeles before, during, and after their World War II incarceration

• Contemporary artworks that confront historic and contemporary revolutions, displacements, and communities, including photographs by William Camargo and Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), and a large painting by the late Los Angeles muralist Noni Olabisi

• Other artistic expressions about American lands and histories from California painter Agnes Pelton and Gee’s Bend, Alabama, quilter Mary Lee Bendolph

“Both in the Declaration’s time and our own, the ideals of life, liberty, and happiness are intertwined with place,” said Lehtinen. “A view that includes both landscapes and people can reveal new ways of understanding nature and nation, now and for the future.”

“Like the nation’s history, the title ‘This Land Is …’ is open-ended and unfinished,” said Garrett-Davis. “The same land may represent opportunity or dispossession, ownership or exclusion, nourishment or loss. Cycles of harm and repair unfold in both ecological and historical contexts, often sharing language as in the ‘uprooting’ of plants or communities, or in ‘amending’ the soil or a law.”

The exhibition comprises six thematic branches, each of which grafts a physical or ecological phenomenon onto the cultural-historical meanings of the section’s name: Roots (origins and foundations of plants and peoples); Uprootings (removals and migrations); Amendments (transformations to landscapes and laws); Edge Effects (margins or borderlands where two zones meet and overlap); Disturbances (destruction and violence to places and people); and Regenerations (repair and restoration).