Jonathan Spaulding

REFLECTIONS

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The environmental history of Los Angeles shares much with that of other major urban areas. Like other cities, Los Angeles is situated within and dependent upon a web of biological and geological systems. Like other cities, Los Angeles radically transformed the landscape and biotic communities of the region. Like other cities, it reached beyond its borders through expanding networks of water, energy, and transport. While it shares much with other metropolitan areas, Los Angeles is unusual in the pervasiveness of its mythic identities and the role those identities have played in shaping its growth. This characteristic provided our key as we began our work.

The exhibit planning began in December of 2003, a mere eight months before content was to be finalized. With the daunting subject and timetable before us, the curators needed an intellectual structure to organize the vast potential material. Our home city has been the focus of much of the museum's research and collections over its ninety-year history. The exhibition offered the opportunity to highlight the museum's commitment to southern California as a subject and as a home, while encouraging our audience to rethink the city and its future.

Our exhibit-content development team—which I led together with Janet Fireman from the history department, Kimball Garrett from ornithology, and staff from throughout the museum—worked closely with exhibit designer, Francois Confino. Known for immersive, experiential exhibitions with a theatrical visual flair and a healthy dose of humor, Confino seemed the ideal choice to wake up the staid predictability typical of our museum and of natural history museums throughout the world.

Confino wanted to explore the popular iconography of the city to give play to his sense of theater and whimsy and to allow for the creation of immersive environments, rich with sound, light, and sensory experience. The curatorial team, meanwhile, was deeply committed to an exploration of the environmental history of the city and the interactions of nature and culture that have shaped that history. By starting in Los Angeles and helping visitors to understand the environmental foundations of their lives, we hoped to provide them with a means to understand their personal connections to global issues of environmental sustainability and human impact on biological systems.

While Los Angeles is a place most people think they know something about, the clichés that dominate popular understanding of the city often obscure the environmental realities of the region. To most of the world, L.A.'s essence lies in Hollywood and all that it implies. People tend to think of Los Angeles as the capital of illusion—a city defined by the manufacture and consumption of fantasy. When the exhibition's curators decided to consider Los Angeles as the subject, they chose to both embrace and question these clichés. We wanted to evoke the popular image, which is so fundamental to this city's allure, but also to undermine the image and, in some small way, contribute to a new popular understanding.

Searching about for titles, we considered a variety of ideas. We settled on L.A.: light / motion / dreams—a play on the apocryphal phrase of the motion picture director, "lights, camera, action!"—for its multiplicity of potential meanings. For those who crave specificity, the curators note that light signifies sensuality, warmth, and freedom; motion represents the opportunity for personal change and for renewal through reinvention, as well as the ceaseless dynamics of natural processes; dreams nourish the continual creation and recreation of the city and a future that is ours to shape.

While the environmental history of this or any other city is rooted in physical and biological realities, the growth of cities is shaped by the imposition of fantasy and desire within those realities. Perhaps nowhere is this more the case than in Los Angeles. Light / motion / dreams explored the interactions among the imaginative, built, and natural environments of the city and the region. In our conception, the environmental history of Los Angeles is a story of nature's push and pull on the human imagination—the possibilities it presents and the constraints it imposes; the shape it gives to society and the transformations that humans have created within it.

The curators brought a wide range of sources and influences to the task. Historical interpretations of the city and its relationship to its natural environment are remarkably disparate. Those for whom Los Angeles is an example of all that is wrong with modern capitalist culture tend to see its relationship to the regional environment in apocalyptic terms. Critics of the city, from Nathanael West to Mike Davis, have portrayed the relationship as one of violence and retribution—fire, flood, earthquake, and predation are the wages of the city's sins erupting within an "ecology of fear." Interpreters with a sunnier outlook, from Charles Lummis to Kevin Starr, have seen the regional environment as a fertile garden of dreams—a benign stage on which a new and expansive future can be played out. In crafting the exhibition spaces, the curators drew from elements of both traditions. The central and defining image of the coyote and the cat synthesized the polarities of historical interpretation while acknowledging nature's ultimate upper hand: The coyote embodies nature's creative response to the constraints and opportunities people place in its way.²

Most appealing to us were authors whose work points to alternatives to this "sunshine or noir" paradigm within the regional historiography. Among those works the curators found significant were Reyner Banham's classic, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies; Dolores Hayden's The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History; Richard Rodriguez's Brown: The Last Discovery of America; D. J. Waldie's Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir; and Blake Gumprecht's The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth. Each in its way encourages a look at the city from ground level. In the same manner that these works provide a refreshing counterpoint to the established mythic constructions of the city's boosters and critics, we hoped that the exhibition's look at specific geographies and use of physical specimens and artifacts would work as a counterpoint to the image world of the exhibition's video installations and prevailing popular perceptions.³

Perhaps the most crucial choice in any exhibition is the choice of interpretive tone. The curators agreed that the fetishization of dystopian apocalypse popularized in the work of Mike Davis had largely run its course. Our own tendencies to embrace the city's pop exuberance seemed in tune with the more optimistic pluralism embodied in such contemporary observers of the city as Rodriguez and Waldie. Perhaps our nod to Banham and Confino's psychedelic surrealism is part of a cultural turn in the city, a return to a sense of possibility and excitement last seen in the 1960s.⁴

The exhibition was structured to convey these concepts and interpretations in emotional and dramatic form. Three-dimensional, immersive video installations dedicated to the mythologies of the region alternated with collections-based spaces exploring its geological, biological, and cultural history. Three video spaces—light, motion, and dreams—were placed between galleries dedicated to four broad topographies: the foothills, the coast, the plains, and the rivers. The video installations explored the "postmodern geographies" of the city—the imaginative constructions of place as image and sensation. The collections-based galleries emphasized the environmental realities of the region through time and intersecting cultures. The alternating video and collections-based spaces created a rhythmic experience for the visitor, now bathed in the sensation of light and sound, now more contemplative before objects and texts.⁵

Figure 2. Bird's Eye View.
Photograph by Bernard Fougere, courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Visitors entered the exhibition to encounter what appeared to be the interior of a spaceship out of some science-fiction fantasy of the 1950s.⁶ The scene evoked Los Angeles's image as the city of the future, a future perhaps now already in the past. In the center of this strange plane was a giant porthole through which visitors viewed the first of the video sequences. It began with an "establishing shot," a view of the earth from space as visitors traveled in a continuous tracking movement down into the southern California landscape and across the Los Angeles basin. Approaching ground level, the point of view shifted to that of an endangered California condor flying over the city, taking in the four topographies explored in the exhibition.

After this introduction, visitors turned the first corner and encountered "The Street," linking the sequential spaces of the exhibition in a horizontal sweep reminiscent of the long boulevards of the city. A text we dubbed "The Word" ran the entire length of the wall and through the following galleries. In place of traditional didactic panels, The Word formed a condensed narrative linking each of the spaces with a series of quotations from a variety of voices representing a broad range of cultural backgrounds, including Paiute poet and historian Richard Stewart, light-and-space artist Robert Irwin, Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, African American rapper Defari, and many others. Each of these quotations intersected the narrative at the point of a shared word. That common word was marked by a graphic image to draw the visitors' attention and provide a visual symbol for each section of the exhibition.

The text began with an introduction of the exhibition themes:

Los Angeles is a dream of light and motion.
When the city shakes and slides and burns,
We wake to remember where we are:
In the foothills, along the coast, across the plains, by the river
Inhabitants of an island on the land,
Caught between the desert and the burning chaparral.
Moving through intersections of light and earth,
Dreaming the future of our city.⁷

Figure 3. The Street.
Photograph by Eric Curtis, courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Around the next corner was Light. For this and the Motion gallery which followed, Confino proposed a trapezoidal system of mirrors surrounding a rear- projection video screen. Walking into the darkened space, viewers were immersed in what appeared to be a vast sphere of kaleidoscopic images. This nod to Jean Baudrillard and his heirs was exhilarating and disorienting, majestic and cunningly false. In our treatment for this sequence, the curatorial team called for a montage of both expected and unexpected: a sea of lights in the city at night, the glowing office towers of downtown, streams of automobiles on the freeway, sunlight on water, the morning light of the desert, the steel-blue skies of a hazy summer afternoon. Filmmakers Peter Kirby and Todd Sali created a rich and subtle montage following a twenty-four hour cycle from dawn through night and back to dawn in a continuous loop.⁸

The visitor next encountered the first of our four regional geographies: the Foothills. Here, as in each collections-based gallery, we searched for a scenographic theme, a key image that would provide the visitor an immediate intuitive understanding of the ideas central to that space. For the Foothills, Confino began with the image of David Hockney's well-known painting, A Bigger Splash. Like many others before and since, Hockney employed the swimming pool as a symbol of "the good life," the search for paradise in elite hideaways; the allure of sensuality, beauty, and leisure; and, above all, a chance to play with light and color.⁹

At the same time, the curators were interested in expressing another aspect of the Los Angeles foothills—what wildlife biologists refer to as the urban/ wildlands interface. We chose the coyote as a symbol of that interface and the interactions it fosters. As a creature native to southern California and noted throughout Native California oral tradition as the troublesome trickster, that avatar of creative destruction, the coyote is the perfect embodiment of the tensions and opportunities, the beauty and the danger along the lost borders of nature and culture in Los Angeles.¹⁰

Confino's brilliant jest—to put the coyote atop Hockney's diving board, provided the visual metaphor for our central theme, in which the cultural construction of an ideal environment comes face to face with the instability and the uncontrollability of nature. Fire, mudslides, earthquakes—all are expressions of a dynamic topography running headlong into the pleasures that money can buy. To represent this dynamic interaction, we selected objects from the broadest possible variety of disciplines.¹¹

One group of cases considered the role of fire in foothill chaparral ecosystems. Objects included fire-adapted native plants, a rare early nineteenth-century Gabrielino/Tongva throwing stick used for hunting small game in fire-thinned brush, and Myth #42, a painting by contemporary Gabrielino/Tongva artist L. Frank Manriquez, in which an anthropomorphized coyote hovers Christ-like above a bank of flame. Native adaptation to foothill fire regimes contrasted with contemporary fire-suppression efforts designed to protect homes and swimming pools like those that anchored the gallery.¹²

Nearby, visitors could consider the relationship between native and exotic species. One small case demonstrated our themes particularly well. When European Americans came to southern California they brought environmental expectations nurtured in the far wetter climes of northern Europe and the eastern United States. Paradise for these people included a host of non-native species. That imported vision and the imported water required to sustain it produced a set of cascading consequences throughout the food web of the native biotic communities.¹³

We highlighted this phenomenon in the story of the Argentine ant, the harvester ant, and the coast horned lizard. Picking up the red telephone below the small case these creatures shared, visitors learned that the exotic Argentine ant has followed a trail of international biological exchange and well-watered lawns into the former habitat of the native harvester ant. With habitat loss and exotic competition, harvester ant populations have declined rapidly, and in their wake the "horny toad," for whom they formed a primary food source, has largely disappeared as well. These detailed stories carried by the objects and their interrelations provided substantive development of the themes implicit in the anchoring scenography of the coyote and the cat.

Leaving the Foothills, visitors encountered a trash can tipped over by a marauding raccoon rooting through the cottage cheese and other containers inside. Nearby was a storm drain with its stenciled warning: No Dumping—Drains to Ocean. Immediately to its left was the entrance to the Coast, the second of the four collections-based galleries. Visitors entered the scene in a pale blue shimmering light. Piles of rusting junk at the outlet of the storm drain confirmed the sense of being underwater just off the Los Angeles shoreline. Along the dark wall, illuminated cases displayed native Gabrielino and Chumash artifacts: whale effigies, abalone shell fishhooks, a carved canoe model, and other objects of a culture sustained by the rich marine life of the southern California coast. Beyond these were cases devoted to threatened habitats and species: the clapper rail and wandering skipper of the coastal estuaries, the least tern and El Segundo blue of coastal dunes—all endangered or eliminated from the region.¹⁴

Three stairways whose glowing, transparent steps contained shells and fish bones strewn across white sand led upward to a mysterious higher realm. Visitors emerged "above water" into a gallery depicting the beach in Santa Monica Bay. Before them was a cut-out diorama of a pop-culture beach scene. Past and present intersected as roller coasters and camel rides of old-time amusement parks stood alongside supertankers, police cars, and skate punks. In the Foothills, visitors saw human encroachment held in check by nature's forces. Here they saw the other side of the nature/culture interaction, with humans going about their business unaware of the ecological effects of their lives.

The question of tone, significant throughout the exhibition, was particularly debated in the development of this gallery. Ultimately, the curators decided to avoid a didactic and negative approach. The show's goal was to be inspirational, not depressing. The beauty of the room's shimmering light and the fun of the stairways and the periscopes placed for those who could not climb the stairs gave the space a playfully mysterious quality. The danger that visitors might not fully appreciate the degree of environmental loss was balanced by the hope that they could recognize the beauty that remains and, in that recognition, work to preserve and restore those environments.

Some visitors believed this an overly cautious approach. Among a group of UCLA environmental history students visiting the exhibition, several criticized what they saw as an avoidance of the truly grim story of regional environmental degradation throughout the exhibition. On the other hand, some longtime museum supporters believed that the museum had gone too far, that it had been given over to an environmentalist agenda. Reactions across the political spectrum inevitably will follow any such exhibition at a large public institution.

The museum's mission statement, "to inspire wonder, discovery, and responsibility of our natural and cultural worlds," suggests that environmental stewardship has become an important part of its role within the community. As a civic institution representing the entire community and supported by government, corporations, and individuals, our museum cannot long survive as a partisan organization. While its policy is to act as a forum for the exchange of ideas and not to function as an advocacy organization, the museum takes seriously its responsibility to the world it studies. Any exhibition about Los Angeles must address controversial issues, but we tried to present those issues as subjects for public debate, to frame the issues and provide a context for our visitors to reach their own conclusions.¹⁵

Figure 4. The Coast—Below Water.
Photograph by Eric Curtis, courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Next on the visitors' path was Motion, the second immersive video space. As in the earlier installation, visitors found themselves within a giant sphere of sight and sound: street scenes; earthquakes; the slow plodding of a desert tortoise; the roar of trains, planes and automobiles; the tides. A balletic skateboarder on a curving mountain road, a Latina evangelist deep in the spirit, dreamers and hustlers of every stripe move in a collective dance, remake the city, and redefine its culture every day—all within the grander motions of geologic time. The earthquake rumble visitors could hear and feel reminded them that the daily hurlyburly of L.A. life exists within a context we only dimly recognize, until nature forcibly wakes us.

Emerging again on The Street, visitors encountered a corner newsstand whose racks were filled with historical and contemporary publications from Los Angeles. The rich array of foreign-language and ethnic media from the mid-nineteenth century to today illustrated the continuity of the city's cultural and ethnic diversity; the phenomenon is both historical and contemporary. The stand featured among its racks ten "living" magazines and newspapers, each a video screen from which interesting people from throughout Los Angeles spoke about the city and their varied experiences of it.

This section received a considerable level of scrutiny within the museum administration attuned to the political sensitivities of any presentation of the city's ethnic diversity. We established a large panel of community advisers to review our process. While time-consuming and subject to internal debate, our efforts to present a wide diversity of viewpoints provided a wonderful range of personalities for the installation as well as a welcome opportunity to move beyond the curatorial voice and into the community in our search for the meanings of Los Angeles.¹⁶

Around the next corner lay the Plains, our invocation of the great stretches of flat basin, which are perhaps the city's archetypal topography. While the elite ensconce themselves in the foothills and along the coast, the sprawling inland grids are where the city's majority lives. In this gallery we focused on the search for community and stability amid constant change and motion. While this section and the Newsstand preceding it were the most explicitly "cultural" in the exhibition, both established important links between environment and society. In the Newsstand, historian Kevin Starr explained the "horizontality" of the city's imaginative and built environment. "Even before the automobile was even invented," he explained, "the imagination was moving across the plains." The vast distances of the Los Angeles basin encouraged expansive visions and a dispersed, low-density urban form from the days of colonial ranchos to contemporary sprawl. While Los Angeles did not invent the suburb, it has become the archetype of the dispersed metropolis and the car culture on which it depends.¹⁷

Poet Wanda Coleman, speaking from the Newsstand as well, considered the impact of automotive dependency on her life and work. It's hard, she explained, for an artist to be part of a creative community in Los Angeles—"you've got to drive." In this fragmented metropolis created amid the convergence of a vast coastal plain, a culture of anti-urbanism, and a technology of private transportation, the search for community and stability is not an easy one. The Newsstand and the Plains were bookended by a pair of quotations in the Word, the wall text that runs throughout the exhibition. First came the words of the Japanese poet, Yone Noguchi, "I stood by an iron rail on the deck, a boy of eighteen years old, alone, friendless, and with less than one hundred dollars in my pocket. I immediately grew conscious of the fact that I had to face unknown America, a land of angels or devils, the darkness." This evocation of the loneliness and uncertainty of the immigrant experience was paired across the Plains gallery with a quotation from an anonymous Chinese American poet writing in the early twentieth century.

It's a summerlike first month of the new year,
Ten thousand houses are decorated with New Year scrolls.
In a foreign country, we celebrate the joyous festival in springtime clothes;
We greet each other by the door, with auspicious sayings:
May you claim a mine full of gold.
May wealth soothe your soul.
Hosts and guests, so gaily, raise jade winecups,
Sipping the spring wine, toasting merrily the swift, rosy clouds.¹⁸

Amid the hostile reception Chinese Americans frequently faced in California, such dreams proved hard to realize. Despite the odds and a reputation to the contrary, home and family, community and continuity are real achievements of the city and its people. Writer D. J. Waldie has made a career of rehabilitating L.A.'s suburban communities in the historical imagination. We lack, he argues, "a workable rhetoric of place for our situation" as Angelenos. Within the city's seemingly incoherent sprawl are hundreds of distinct neighborhoods, "an ordinary landscape where millions of working people express their flawed and hopeful idea of home."¹⁹

Figure 5. The Plains, Frank Romero Mural.
Photograph by Eric Curtis, courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

To convey these concepts in visual form, the Plains gallery was designed as a suburban living room. Through human-shaped doorways, visitors entered a room with simple furnishings: a coffee table laden with photograph albums, paintings on the walls, cabinets full of objects—all rare artifacts from nineteenth-century California, collected and donated by some of the leading Californio families and representing the great era of ranching life across plains of the Los Angels basin.

The paintings by artists Henri Penelon, Carlos Almaraz, and J. Michael Walker looked beyond the contemporary clichés of transience, sensation, and surface to emphasize the historic roots of the city and its Hispanic heritage. They spoke as well to the continuity of that heritage and the resurgence of a Latino civic identity in contemporary Los Angeles.²⁰ As counterpoint and conversation with this more recent history the video projection across the opposite wall of the living room reviewed the long geological and biological history of the basin. The video began with the basin underwater some 10 million years ago as passing whales and sea turtles eyed the visitors curiously. This segued to a grassy savanna with sabertooth cats lurking around the famous La Brea tar pits some twenty thousand years ago, then to the Los Angeles pueblo in the 1830s, and so on to the present day.

Emerging from the living room, visitors encountered a magical realist streetscape installation by Chicano artist Frank Romero. Most prominent was the mural he created specifically for the exhibition. Over forty feet long, it curved across an entire wall with a panorama of the city from Romero's studio in the Elysian Valley, following the course of the L.A. River through downtown and south Los Angeles to the harbor. In front of it was Romero's signature sculptural lowrider with multicolored palm trees, a playful pop reminder that the symbols of the city belong to everyone.

Figure 6. The River.
Photograph by Eric Curtis, courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Through the portal of Romero's mural visitors entered the fourth and final geography: the Rivers. The gallery was configured to resemble the Los Angeles River itself. Visitors walked between parallel banks that began with native vegetation, turned to concrete, and finally began to break down, covered on one side with poet Gary Synder's "Night Song of the Los Angeles Basin" with its invocation of

Vole paths. Mouse trails worn in
On meadow grass;
Winding pocket-gopher tunnels,
Marmot lookout rocks.
Houses with green watered lawns
Slip under the ghost of dry chaparral²¹

The opposite bank pulsed with an iridescent graffiti piece by underground artist Saber. The cases that ran along each side of the passage began with specimens of native species: the grizzly bear, the red-legged frog, the steelhead trout, the extinct Los Angeles River shrimp, and many others.²²

Following that were artifacts of the human uses of the river and the city that grew up along its banks: an early nineteenth-century wooden plow once used by the ranchero Manuel Dominguez, a section of wooden water pipe from the city's nineteenth-century water system, a set of cooper's tools, and a brandy still used by Jean Louis Vignes, the city's first commercial vintner and first importer of Bordeaux grape varieties to California. Along the opposite bank were a map of the turn-of-the-century system of zanjas (open irrigation canals), photographs of orange groves and their Mexican labor force, and an orange-crate label illustrating the agricultural foundations of the city's early boom and the local water sources that made it all possible.

Just downstream were cases dedicated to what some call the city's original sin, the Owens Valley water project, the massive aqueduct opened in 1913 to bring water 250 miles from the snowfields of the Sierra Nevada to the dry plains of Los Angeles. On loan from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power were engineer William Mulholland's personal surveyor's transit, his construction plan book, several photographs of toiling crews laying pipe across the desert landscape, and a vial of water from the day the Los Angeles aqueduct opened to Mulholland's famous command: "There it is. Take it!" Nearby were artifacts representing the growth the imported water made possible, including a map advertising the Van Nuys tract of the Suburban Homes Company, the real estate venture whose members profited from their insider knowledge of the water's destination in the San Fernando Valley.²³

Photographs of rampaging flood waters and the concrete channels built to contain them documented the river's sad demise. The lost possibilities for public open space along the river's flood plain—exemplified by the 1930 river park plans developed by the Olmsted Brothers and Harlan Bartholomew Associates— accompanied contemporary visions of restored habitat and public recreation space, hopeful expressions of a rising civic consensus that the river might once again be a central public space within the city. A ragtag collection of contemporary denizens of the L.A. River, from native oppossums to feral cats, suggested that whatever the river's future, the life along its banks will reflect the irrepressible hybrid city through which it flows.²⁴

The final video installation was called Dreams. Three projectors bathed visitors in a sea of images. Reflective walls, floor, and ceiling lent a sense of infinite space. The room provided the opportunity to consider what the visitor had experienced so far and what the city's future might hold. "What are your dreams" a voice intoned, and a wide array of Angelenos gave their answers. "I don't have a dream ... I have a nightmare of Los Angeles," said African American poet Wanda Coleman, "that South Central will be all white. There will be no blacks in the inner city." Poet and river advocate Lewis MacAdams spoke of the city as "a space-age Marrakech, a global crossroads on the edge of the desert." He looked to the day when "cormorants, red-legged frogs, and humans can meet as equals" along the river. A small boy dreamed of himself and the city, "bigger and bigger and bigger!" Outside the gallery, visitors could post on the wall multicolored cards with their handwritten dreams. A compilation of some of the thousands of notes reveals a marvelously insightful civic portrait. Materialism and personal ambition ran high. Some were quite specific: "I want to spend a night with Johnny Depp!" Reassuring are the many who dream of a city and world at peace, who seek safe parks and clean water. Others dream of their families, of parents or grandparents now gone or separated by thousands of miles.²⁵

Figure 7. Dreams.
Photograph by Bernard Fougere, courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Reactions to the exhibition were generally enthusiastic, but questions remain. For example, the show's visual delights often overwhelmed other considerations. Some visitors came away wondering if the exhibit was not too much like the city it portrays—all surface and no depth. Like the city, however, the exhibit's meanings and most authentic moments required a little digging to discover. There was considerable discussion on this matter during the development of the exhibit. The museum's vice president for public programs, Vanda Vitali, believed strongly that exhibitions need to convey their messages through visual and emotional means rather than just through words. Nevertheless, for visitors to appreciate the full depth and complexity of the subject, additional texts should be available via supporting materials. The ambitious timetable prevented the development of a scholarly catalog in which topics introduced in the exhibition could be developed in greater depth. As an alternative, producers Peter Kirby and Peter Bergman created a companion DVD with interviews and additional footage exploring many of the exhibit's themes beyond the museum walls.²⁶

While scholars reflexively rely on texts to communicate, exhibitions have a language of their own. Scholars who wish to communicate through this medium must learn to utilize its strengths while recognizing its limitations. Much of the meaning in our galleries was derived from the connections among objects. Marion Kavenaugh Watchel's plein air watercolor Valley Scene, for example, is a beautiful piece in and of itself. Its meanings within the Foothills gallery, however, arose from its relationship to other works within the space. The rockslide which has torn its way into the family living room in the Julius Shulman photograph next to the watercolor might cause visitors to reconsider the message of tranquility the painting conveys. The lithograph for an 1880s real estate development on the opposite wall echoed its idealized imagery. Do the two pieces share a similar agenda in the commodification of the landscape? Is the artist an unconscious participant in this process?

Many museum visitors are not used to thinking in this way. They are familiar with objects in an art gallery that stand alone, individual masterpieces to be appreciated solely for their individual merits. Objects in natural history museums are often grouped, but usually by taxon or environment, as in traditional displays of birds or diorama habitats. To integrate and contextualize collections and disciplines is as much a challenge for the visitor as it is for curators.

Within the museum, the innovative strategies employed in the exhibition found a mixed response. Many curators, especially among the science disciplines, found the show lacking in substance—too theatrical and decidedly non-scientific. A panel of outside museum professionals, however, strongly endorsed the innovative format. Several noted that the exhibition was at the forefront of an emerging movement not only in museums of natural history, but in museums of all sorts. Boundaries and traditional definitions are breaking down, opening the way to a fertile period of experimentation and transformation. Several of the museum professionals found the texts largely superfluous and anachronistic, the curatorial voice an unwarranted intrusion. With my fellow curators, I believe that the optimum ground lies somewhere between these two perspectives. Visitor studies make it clear, however, that scientific rigor and the communication of factual information is seldom of paramount concern to most museum goers. Focus groups praised the show's beauty and drama. They clearly understood and responded to the broader environmental message.²⁷

The debate is not exactly new. In 1969, a group of designers, theorists, and museum professionals came together to consider how to make museum displays more compelling and significant for visitors. Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, leading proponents of new media, argued for a radical rethinking of prevailing methods, little changed from the nineteenth century. Galleries remained sequential, linear, and logical. "Museums are still feeding on the book," Parker complained. "What I'm asking is, please, let us recognize that this is a unique medium. Explore it and begin to exploit it."²⁸

To what extent museums and scholars take up that charge remains to be seen. Certainly many in their audience are ready. In the weeks before the close of light / motion / dreams, a group of school children walked through the museum's marble halls, approaching the entrance to the gallery. Spying the Bird's-Eye View with its glowing orb of earth, one of the group broke into a run. "I'm heading into the future," he shouted, as he spread out his arms like wings.

Jonathan Spaulding, formerly associate curator of history in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, is executive director and chief curator of the Museum of the American West in the Autry National Center, Los Angeles, California. He is the author of Ansel Adams and the American Landscape: A Biography (California, 1995) and co-author of Edward Weston: A Legacy (Merrell, 2003).

NOTES

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the joint annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History and the National Council on Public History in Victoria, British Columbia, 1 April 2004. My thanks to Andrew Hurley for organizing the panel and to Janet Fireman for her careful reading of the manuscript.

^1. For an overview of issues facing those who seek to present environmental history to the public through museum exhibitions, see Jeffery K. Stine, "Placing Environmental History on Display," Environmental History 7 (October 2002): 566–88. See also Judith Gradwohl, et al., The Environment on Display: Environmental Initiatives in Science Museums and Related Institutions (Washington, D.C.: Office of Environmental Awareness, Smithsonian Institution and Association of Science-Technology Centers, 1993); and Peter Davis, Museums and the Natural Environment: The Role of Natural History Museums in Biological Conservation (London: Leicester University Press, 1996). For a discussion of environmental history within the full range of public history venues, see Catherine A. Christen and Lisa Mighetto, "Environmental History as Public History," The Public Historian (Winter 2004): 9–19. For the historical context of museum development, see Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995); and Michael Ames, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1991). For a survey of contemporary issues, see Peter Noever, ed., The Discursive Museum (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2001); Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1996); and the special issue of Daedelus: America's Museums (Summer 1999).

^2. Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (New York: Random House, 1939); Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998); Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). For samples of Charles Lummis's writings on Los Angeles, see "From the Lion's Den," his regular editorials in the monthly magazine, Land of Sunshine, later renamed Out West, from 1894 through 1904. For a recent review of the lively and fast-growing contemporary historiography of the city, see "Historicizing the City of Angels," American Historical Review (December 2000): 1667–91, review essays by Robert A. Schneider, Michael E. Engh, S. J., and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch. See also Philip J. Ethington, "Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge," which appeared in the electronic edition of the journal and is now archived by The History Cooperative: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.5/index.html. For a comprehensive, searchable bibliography of Los Angeles, see the University of Southern California, Archival Research Center, Los Angeles Comprehensive Bibliographic Database: http://www.usc.edu/isd/archives/arc/lacbd. While suggesting the reading of the coyote and the cat described above, I do not wish to limit other interpretations. One of the great characteristics of symbols is their malleability and multiplicity of potential meanings. Phil Ethington, for example, whose work is cited above, reviewed our plans at an early stage of development. Looking at Confino's rendering of the diving board and its occupants, he commented: "Oh, the return of the repressed!" I didn't press for more explanation, but gathered some implications: the lurking violence within the paradise garden, and, as cited in the text above, nature's own uncontrollability. Of course, he may not have meant any of these things.

^3. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971; reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995); Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America (New York: Viking, 2002); D. J. Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); and Blake Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). The full bibliography of works consulted in the development of the exhibition numbers more than one hundred titles.

^4. D. J. Waldie, "Ecology of Hope," summary comments for A Sustainable Future? Environmental Patterns and the Los Angeles Past, John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation Symposium, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., 19–20 September 2003. The full conference proceedings are available on DVD from the Haynes Foundation and Caltech. See, also, William Deverell and D. J. Waldie, "Can L.A. Survive? Our Region's Fragile Environmental Balance Demands Changes in the Way We Live," Los Angeles Times, Opinion, 19 October 2003.

^5. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989).

^6. Francois Confino's design for this section, The Bird's-Eye View, is an homage to Syd Mead, industrial designer and consultant for classic science-fiction films, including the iconic Los Angeles distopian vision, Blade Runner.

^7. As the exhibition's lead curator, I wrote this and other texts linking a number of quotations from other sources.

^8. For samples of the work of this critic of capitalist media culture, see Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980).

^9. Paul Melia and Ulrich Luckhardt, David Hockney: Paintings (Munich: Prestal, 1994).

^10. Christopher Reynolds, "The Coyote and the Cat: An Urban Tale," Los Angeles Times, Outdoors, 6 April 2004.

^11. Useful here was John McPhee's classic essay, "Los Angeles against the Mountains," in John McPhee, The Control of Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 183 272.

^12. Examples of L. Frank Manriquez's work can be found in Margaret Dubin, ed., The Dirt Is Red Here: Art and Poetry from Native California (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2002). Native use of fire and other environmental-management techniques are explored in Thomas C. Blackburn and Kat Anderson, eds., Before the Wilderness: Environmental Management by Native Californians (Menlo Park, Calif.: Ballena Press, 1993). This throwing stick and several other artifacts from the exhibition are featured in Travis Hudson and Thomas Blackburn, The Material Culture of the Chumash Interaction Sphere, 5 vols. (Los Altos, Calif.: Ballena Press; Santa Barbara, Calif.: Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, 1982–1987): See 3:133–36, for a discussion of the throwing stick displayed in the exhibition.

^13. The curators referred here to the work of Michael Soule among others. See, for example, Michael E. Soule, "Land Use Planning and Wildlife Maintenance: Guidelines for Conserving Wildlife in an Urban Landscape," Journal of the American Planning Association (1991): 313–23. See also Jon E. Keeley, ed., Interface between Ecology and Land Development in California (Los Angeles: Southern California Academy of Sciences, 1993); D. T. Bolger, et al., "Response of Rodents to Habitat Fragmentation in Coastal Southern California," Ecological Applications (May 1997): 552–63; and D. T. Bolger, et al., "Arthropods in Urban Habitat Fragments in Southern California: Area, Age, and Edge Effects," Ecological Applications (September 2000): 1230–48.

^14. Ralph W. Schreiber, ed., The Biota of the Ballona Region, Los Angeles County (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Natural History Museum Foundation, 1991), Supplement I, Marina del Rey/Ballona Local Coastal Plan.

^15. Students in Lissa Wadewitz's summer 2004 U.S. environmental history course, personal communications with the author. For a recent discussion of controversial exhibitions on history themes, see James B. Gardner, "Contested Terrain: History, Museums, and the Public," The Public Historian (Fall 2004): 11–21.

^16. For a comparative study of the treatment of racial and ethnic diversity in Los Angeles museums, see Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Carl Grodach, "Displaying and Celebrating the 'Other': A Study of the Mission, Scope, and Roles of Ethnic Museums in Los Angeles," The Public Historian 26 (Fall 2004): 49–71.

^17. The reasons for the suburban sprawl in L.A. may be found among the intersections of culture, technology, public policy, and geography. See, for example, Richard W. Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); and Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

^18. Yone Noguchi, excerpt from "The Story of Yone Noguchi," in The Literature of California: Volume One, Native Beginnings to 1945, ed. Jack Hicks, et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 330–38, quote on 331; Anonymous Chinese American poet, in Marlon K. Hom, ed. and trans., Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 193.

^19. D. J. Waldie, "What L.A.'s Suburbs Can Teach Us," Los Angeles Times, Opinion, 15 December 2004. See, also, Waldie, Holy Land; and D. J. Waldie Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Angel City Press, 2004).

^20. Work by featured artists Frank Romero, Carlos Almaraz, and Leo Limon, who had a solo exhibition, Leo Limon: Corazon of the City, elsewhere in the museum during the run of light / motion / dreams, can be found in Cheech Marin, et al., Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge (Boston: Little Brown, 2002). On Penelon, the city's first resident fine artist, see John Dewar, Adios, Mr. Penelon: Henri Penelon, Painter, Photographer, El Pueblo de Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, 1968).

^21. Gary Snyder, "Night Song of the Los Angeles Basin," in Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, ed. David Ulin (New York: Library of America, 2002), 710–12.

^22. Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River. See also Kimball Garrett, ed., The Biota of the Los Angeles River: An Overview of the Historical and Present Plant and Animal Life of the Los Angeles River Drainage (Los Angeles: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Foundation, 1993, typescript). On the Los Angeles River shrimp, see J. W. Martin and M. K. Wicksten, "Review and Redescription of the Freshwater Atyid Shrimp Genus Syncaris Holmes, 1900, in California," Journal of Crustacean Biology (Summer 2004): 447–62.

^23. William Kahrl, Water and Power: The Controversy Over Los Angeles' Water Supply in the Owens Valley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982); and Catherine Mulholland, William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).

^24. Olmsted Brothers and Bartholomew Associates, Parks, Playgrounds and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region (Los Angeles: 1930); and Greg Hise and William Deverell, Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).

^25. Dream card responses are compiled in "Light / Motion / Dreams Evaluation" files, Department of Public Programs, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

^26.L.A.: light / motion / dreams : The Making of an Exhibition, produced by Media Arts Services, Los Angeles, in association with The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 2004.

^27. Evaluations and visitor studies are in "Evaluation" files, Department of Public Programs, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

^28. Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Jacques Barzun, Exploration of the Ways, Means, and Values of Museum Communication with the Visiting Public (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1969), 32.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.