REFLECTIONS

ON 'L.A.: LIGHT/ MOTION/ DREAMS': DEVELOPING AN EXHIBITION ON THE NATURAL AND CULTURAL history of los angeles

JONATHAN SPAULDING

A BLACK AND WHITE panorama of coastal hills and dry chaparral sweeps across four walls of a darkened space; in the center stands a glowing backlit image of a mid-century modernist home. A sparkling pool curves out from the bottom of the frame, extending forward into the room, the image now in three dimensions. A real diving board hovers above the glowing pool, drawing us forward. At the tip of the diving board, where we might expect a blonde starlet, a lean coyote stands, its sharp gaze intent on the house before it, in its mouth the limp body of the family cat. Native and exotic collide in a fabricated paradise and it seems the coyote has won the day.	1
This scene anchored the first collections-based gallery in a recent exhibition, L.A.: light / motion / dreams. A team from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, working in collaboration with designers and production teams from France, Canada, and the United States, organized the exhibition, which opened to the public in Los Angeles in March 2004 and ran through January 2005. The exhibition was among the first tangible results of a new direction for the museum, one that attempts to integrate science and the humanities in a new approach to the conception and execution of exhibitions.	2
As they seek to sustain and build audiences, museums of all types are reconsidering their subject matter and the manner in which they communicate with the public. Natural history museums in particular are looking to move beyond traditional intellectual frameworks and display techniques in order to address contemporary issues of environmental sustainability in a language that communicates not only in an intellectual way, but through the emotions and the senses.	3
Figure 1. The Foothills. Photograph by Eric Curtis, courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
Since their origins as private "cabinets of curiosities," museums have collected artifacts and presented them in rationally ordered arrays grouped by taxon, culture area, chronology, or other such categories. Objects rested in glass cases for viewers' inspection, their "meaning" conveyed via texts written by museum curators. While individual objects remain fascinating in themselves, the story they collectively communicate, in these traditional displays, is largely a cognitive one. Today, many museums seek to bring emotion, drama, and intuition, the most ancient devices of the storyteller, into their exhibitions to tap the power of the whole mind and to move the visitor not only to think, but to feel and to act.	4
For environmental historians, this movement should be fascinating to observe and to help create. The exhibition presented a rare and welcome opportunity to present new interpretations of the city in a compelling and dramatic way. The development of L.A.: light / motion / dreams sheds light not only on issues surrounding the interpretation of urban environmental history, but also on the way in which those interpretations can be communicated to a wider public.1	. . .