Venue
The Huntington's Education Center
1151 Oxford Rd.
San Marino, CA 91108
Out of the Woodwork: U.S. Forests and Black Cultures, 1800-1940
Wednesday, February 26, 2025 at 7:30 p.m.
Cost: Free with reservation
Sponsor: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
For more information call: 626-405-2100
Or click here: https://huntington.org/event/out-woodwork-us-forests-and-black-cultures-1800-1940
Please join Susan Scott Parrish, professor at the University of Michigan, and R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow in the Humanities at The Huntington Library for a lecture on the role that Black artisans and artists played in the transformation of eastern U.S. forests into built environments and painted landscapes. Until the early 1900s, Americans lived in an Age of Wood. Vast forests in the eastern half of the U.S. and the Pacific Northwest were converted into railroad ties, carts and carriages, houses and buildings, barrels for conveying goods, and charcoal to power emergent industries. Historians have told us a great deal about the Euro-Americans who either took part in this process of deforestation and development or who warned about its recklessness. And we know of Euro-American artists, like Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church, who made the forests into national symbols, even as they disappeared. Historians have had less to say about the African Americans, especially—but not exclusively—in the Southeast, who were integral to the Age of Wood. This is the Avery Distinguished Fellow Lecture. For more information and to register, visit the above provided link.
