Exhibitions in 2009

Starting off the year, the Contemporary Masters, Artistic Eden II:  Life in the San Gabriel Valley exhibition celebrated Pasadena’s historic and contemporary role as a center for the fine arts. This juried art exhibition featured modern artists’ interpretations of the San Gabriel Valley. Exhibitions of this sort provide an opportunity to focus on the intersection of history, culture, and fine art, and bring the feeling of the salon a la Eva Fenyes to life in a modern context.  (Image:  F. Scott Garland.  "Evening Bridge." Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in.)

In May, PMH opened the much-anticipated Family Stories:  Sharing a Community’s Legacy exhibition. Family Stories was the result of more than two years of research, including hundreds of hours of interviews and community meetings, and was designed to highlight the Pasadena area’s diverse past. Six families, each representing a different ethnic group, provided a vivid demonstration of the wide range of local experiences to be found in our community. The exhibition has been heavily supplemented with public programming, including lectures, food events, panel discussions, and other activities, all of which help to provide a multi-layered approach to exhibition design that integrates all of the senses into the overall experience. It was an approach that worked well, and we look forward to drawing on lessons learned during the course of this exhibition in the future.

Family Stories carries with it significance that will last well beyond 2009. It provided PMH staff and volunteers the opportunity to renew old friendships as well as to establish new ones, and to publicly commit to the philosophy that everyone’s history is significant and worthy of preserving. Relationships created during Family Stories will help PMH continue to expand its collections to include the stories of all local residents, including those underrepresented in the current collections, and will continue to allow PMH to be an organization known as a gathering place for the community as a whole to come together to discuss our past, present, and future. We thank everyone who has been involved with Family Stories, whether advisor, donor, interviewee, public program participant, or visitor; it is you who gave this exhibition its life and its relevancy. We look forward to years of future partnerships.

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