“the eight directions of the wind: Edmund de Waal at The Huntington,” installation view in the Studio for Lodging the Mind. © Edmund de Waal, 2025. Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens is running a family ceramics program Sunday tied to its yearlong exhibition by British artist and author Edmund de Waal, offering docent talks and hands-on artmaking from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
The program, called “Second Sundays: Edmund de Waal,” is free with general admission and centers on the exhibition “the eight directions of the wind: Edmund de Waal at The Huntington,” which runs through October 26, 2026. Visitors can create their own ceramic vessels inspired by de Waal’s work, hear docent talks in the Huntington Art Gallery at 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., and listen to two Spotify playlists curated by de Waal and cultural historian Josh Kun. The Huntington sits just south of Pasadena and Altadena, and its “Second Sundays” series is a recurring family offering for visitors of all ages.
De Waal’s exhibition, which opened October 18, 2025, spans three Huntington sites: the Huntington Art Gallery, the Chinese Garden’s Studio for Lodging the Mind, and the Japanese Garden’s Marsh Tea House. The three installations are titled “on sanctuary,” “on porcelain” and “on shadows,” and incorporate text, natural materials and recent works by de Waal alongside pieces from The Huntington’s own collections.
De Waal, born in 1964, is a ceramicist and author based in London. He wrote the memoir “The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance,” published in 2010, along with “The White Road” (2015), “Letters to Camondo” (2021) and “an Archive” (2025). He received the Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction from Yale University in 2015, was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2021, and received the Isamu Noguchi Award in 2023 and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2024.
In a statement The Huntington released announcing the exhibition, Christina Nielsen, the museum’s Hannah and Russel Kully Director of the Art Museum, said de Waal’s installations “offer meditations on beauty, displacement, and the fragility of culture.”
The Huntington is located at 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA 91108, and is open daily except Tuesdays, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Information on tickets and admission is available at huntington.org; general inquiries can be directed to (626) 405-2100 or through the contact form at huntington.org/contact-us.
The exhibition’s run continues through October 26, 2026, with additional public programs — including ceramics workshops and listening sessions tied to the show — planned into next year, according to The Huntington.
