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“City of Art and Science” Collaboration to Produce The Tender Land: In its distinct character and passion for art and science, Pasadena is a thriving epicenter. This collaboration is the third such organized in Pasadena but unprecedented in scale, with up to half a million visitors expected. Taken from the opera by Aaron Copland, The Tender Land title suggests the fragility of nature and our relationship to it. The festival will kick off with a citywide celebration and Family Day on Oct. 9, 2004 with free shuttle service offered between venues from noon to 6 p.m. The festival will continue through Jan. 31, 2005 with more than 30 cultural organizations, the public school district, the city and several businesses collaborating to offer performances, concerts, exhibitions, films, lessons, tours and discussions that explore how approaches to nature have changed through time and across cultures. The festival has something for everyone. Among the highlights are concerts by two Grammy award winners, Paul Winter and Southwest Chamber Music. Opera enthusiasts can hear world-renowned Wagnerian soprano Jane Eaglen perform Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, which depicts the “four seasons” of life. Photography ranges from Richard Misrach’s images of a toxic waste dump to the Automobile Association’s archives of roads. In three-dimensional installation art, a sound and sculpture artist is collaborating with a Caltech geophysicist and a student of robotics, and a botanist and kinetic artist have teamed up for a one-of-a-kind garden for children to experience nature. Two film series will offer classic feature films indoors and art films outdoors that portray how humans relate to nature. Beloved landscape masterpieces from Western and Asian art will be on exhibit. History buffs will enjoy an interactive exhibition on the role of water in the development of Southern California, the re-creation of a Gabrielino-Tongva Nation village, and traditional songs of Ecuadorian Indians. “The Tender Land collaboration provides an opportunity for very different organizations to come together around a common theme,” says Stephen Nowlin, director of the Williamson Gallery at Art Center College of Design, and one of the festival’s organizers. In addition, the Pasadena Star-News daily newspaper will participate as a venue, interpreting The Tender Land theme through a series of essays and reports. A host of community partners are participating as well, from individual artists to large and small organizations and including such places as Pasadena Art Alliance, Pasadena Conservatory of Music, Pasadena City College, Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, and Latino Heritage Association. The Pasadena Unified School District will have The Tender Land woven into its curriculum, and the City of Pasadena is supporting the festival, creating truly citywide participation. Festival sponsors include Parsons Foundation, Pasadena Arts Commission, Pasadena Art Alliance, Pasadena Community Foundation, Patagonia Pasadena, Villa Gardens Retirement Community and the Pasadena Arts Council. “There are many creative minds right here in Pasadena. They can be found in the professions of design, engineering, science, technology, development, finance, education, the arts, even government. All you have to do is look around anywhere you go in Pasadena to see this community has a culture of creativity,” said Mayor Bill Bogaard in his State of the City address in early 2004. For festival programs and exhibitions at specific venues, go to tenderland.org. As a result, a second festival was planned, The Universe: A Convergence of Art, Music and Science. This eight-institution festival was inspired by the creation of the modern theory of the universe at Mt. Wilson in the San Gabriel mountains just north of Pasadena. Because of the increase in participating institutions, special programs and more extensive community outreach, this festival was even better attended than the first. “The synergy, community interest and increased attendance demanded a third festival,” says Jay Belloli, another festival organizer and director of Gallery Programs at the Armory Center for the Arts. "This is our most ambitious effort to date, easily the largest exhibition and performance festival ever organized in Pasadena.” The city embraces a long history of interaction between the two disciplines, going as far back as the late nineteenth century when the MIT-trained architects Henry and Charles Greene relocated to Pasadena and created some the greatest Arts and Crafts buildings in the country. As part of a vibrant Craftsman movement in the 1920s, the extraordinary tilemaker Ernest Batchelder was teaching at Throop Polytechnic – the school that was ultimately to become Caltech. In 1922 the Pasadena Art Museum was first established, ultimately growing into a nationally recognized center for avant-garde art. During this same decade the Mount Wilson 100-inch telescope, operated by Pasadena-based Carnegie Observatories, was where Edwin Hubble made his revolutionary discovery that the universe was expanding. In the 1930s Caltech’s Linus Pauling discovered how atoms link up to form molecules. In 1953 the Pasadena Art Museum acquired the important Galka Scheyer collection of several hundred works by Lyonel Feininger, Alexei von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. The museum was the first place in the world to give Marcel Duchamp a retrospective, in 1963, and was where the work of Kurt Schwitters, Robert Motherwell, and Jasper Johns was shown to a West-Coast audience. At the same time Pauling, Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann and Max Delbrück each brought Nobel Prizes to Caltech. The Pasadena Art Museum and Caltech were also home to the 60s’ Encounters series of musical programs, introducing composers and musicians such as Harry Partch, John Cage, Arnold Schoenberg, and David Tudor in a string of public performances. Pasadena is where Theodore von Karman established the principles of modern aviation and jet flight. It is where Caltech runs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which designed and built the first Mariner planetary probe in 1962 and now follows the Spirit probe on the surface of Mars. It is home to The Planetary Society, and it is where one of the world’s great art collections resides at the Norton Simon Museum. The influence of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens is as pervasive around the world as it is in the Pasadena area. And, relative newcomers, Art Center College of Design (where more than 60 percent of the world’s automobile designers have studied), Armory Center for the Arts, Pacific Asia Museum, and Pasadena Museum of California Art all contribute to the rich and culturally textured environment that is Pasadena. |
This October, The Tender Land: Pasadena Festival of Art, History, Music and Science will showcase this mid-sized city’s unique mix of world-class art and science institutions through an impressive array of activities that promise to amuse, enchant, inspire and provoke. 
Each organization participating in the consortium interprets The Tender Land theme independently, providing a citywide mosaic of nature’s complexity. Together they organize a festival publication, free bus tours, website, and opening day celebrations. Major institutions in the consortium are Armory Center for the Arts; Art Center College of Design’s Williamson Gallery and South Campus Wind Tunnel Exhibition Hall; California Institute of Technology; The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens; Norton Simon Museum; One Colorado shopping complex; Pacific Asia Museum; Pasadena Museum of California Art; Pasadena Museum of History; Pasadena Symphony; Shumei Arts Council of America, Southwest Chamber Music, Pasadena Star-News and the City of Pasadena.