Pasadena Museum of History [photo credit: Visit Pasadena]
The exhibition, called Pasadena Palette: Selections from Pasadena Museum of History’s Collection, opened March 7 in the History Center galleries at 470 W. Walnut St. and runs through December 27. The museum describes the works as celebrating “artists who lived and worked in Pasadena, portraits of notable residents, and vibrant scenes painted throughout the Crown City” — art made here, about here, by people who were from here, and seldom seen by anyone.
The Pasadena Museum of History has been building its collection since its founding in 1924 as the Pasadena Historical Society. What visitors most commonly encounter in the museum are the paintings on display in the landmark Fényes Mansion — the 1906 estate that forms the heart of the campus. But the museum’s materials make clear that a larger body of work exists beyond those well-known rooms, kept in storage by the kind of institutional accumulation that is the quiet reality of most collecting museums.
Pasadena Palette is the museum’s answer to that reality: a decision to pull those works off the shelf and let the public see what has been sitting there.
The timing is not incidental. The year 2026 marks three milestones for Pasadena and the broader region: the city’s 140th birthday, the centennial of Route 66, and the 150th anniversary of Colorado Boulevard. The museum has organized a year-long calendar of events in partnership with an Anniversary Planning Council of more than 30 community groups, with Pasadena Palette serving as the anchor exhibition through the end of the year.
On June 14, the museum will host a free, all-ages community event, “Happy Birthday Pasadena: Highway to Adventure!,” on its campus. The celebration will include vintage vehicle displays, live music, watercolor painting workshops with the Pasadena Society of Artists, and mini self-guided tours of the Fényes Mansion and the Finnish Folk Art Museum. Mayor Victor M. Gordo and other VIP guests are expected to participate. The event marks the Route 66 centennial the highway opened in November 1926, running through Pasadena along Colorado Boulevard alongside the city’s birthday and the boulevard’s own 150th anniversary.
Visitors need only show an ID at the Museum Store. General admission on other days is $9; seniors pay $7; children under 18 and museum members enter free.
The museum is open Thursday through Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. The Research Library and Archives which holds nearly one million historic photographs, documents, and artifacts spanning the years 1834 to the present is open Friday through Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m., and admission is free. Parking is complimentary in the lot off Walnut Street, near the corner of Orange Grove Boulevard. For information, visit pasadenahistory.org or call 626.577.1660.
The museum’s roots in the Fényes Estate give Pasadena Palette a particular resonance. Eva Scott Fényes, the matriarch whose family built the mansion and whose heirs eventually donated the estate to the museum in 1970, was herself a prolific plein air artist, a contemporary of Benjamin Chambers Brown, the California painter whose work hangs in the mansion today. The collection the museum now holds grew, in part, from a household that understood what it meant to make art about a place. What Pasadena Palette offers, at its core, is a chance to see how many others understood that too.
Pasadena Museum of History Venue: 470 W. Walnut St., Pasadena, CA 91103 Link: https://www.visitpasadena.com/blog/a-guide-to-pasadenas-museums/
