The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino has opened a new exhibition titled “This Land Is…,” curated to coincide with the United States’ upcoming semiquincentennial. The show features a cross-section of a 250-year-old oak tree uprooted in a 1993 windstorm, Woody Guthrie’s guitar inscribed “This Machine Kills Fascists,” a copy of the Declaration of Independence annotated by John McKesson, and a panoramic portrait of the Kuromi family, Japanese American flower farmers who were incarcerated during World War II. The exhibition was spearheaded by senior curator of photography Linde B. Lehtinen and curator of Western American history Josh Garrett-Davis, and runs through early next year.
The exhibition matters because it uses land as a central lens to explore America’s complex history of promise, struggle, and belonging, coinciding with the nation’s 250th anniversary. By juxtaposing objects of protest, resilience, and displacement—such as Guthrie’s activist guitar and the Kuromi family’s incarceration story—the show invites visitors to reflect on how land has shaped American identity and conflict. It represents a timely, interdisciplinary curatorial effort that connects historical artifacts with contemporary social and political themes.