Daily Archives: March 7, 2025

Thursday, March 20, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm Eastern – Celebrating the Experimental: The Case Study Houses, Live and Online

by

This is the fourth and final program in the Morvin Museum’s 2025 Grand Homes and Gardens Speaker Series, The Quality of Doing: Mid-Century Modern Grand Homes & Gardens, featuring four scholars who will look at the work of Mid-Century Modern architects and designers through the lens of landmark homes and gardens across the United States. Learn more about the series and purchase series tickets.

In 1945, Arts + Architecture magazine commissioned major architects to study, design, and build efficient and affordable model homes. The program anticipated a residential housing boom in the United States in the aftermath of World War II. Architects sought to create prototypes that could be cheaply and easily mass-produced while championing a modern design aesthetic. The resulting “Case Study Houses” were concentrated in the Los Angeles area and featured the work of architects such as Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, and Eero Saarinen (among many others). This talk with art historian, curator, and author Elizabeth A. T. Smith will introduce the most celebrated, experimental, and influential Case Study Houses, some of which are still standing today.  Those that are still standing were miraculously spared from the devastation of the recent Los Angeles fires.

All talks begin at 6:30 p.m. in Morven’s Stockton Education Center. Doors and the virtual waiting room open at 6:00 p.m. A Zoom link will be sent to all virtual participants upon registration. Light refreshments inspired by each site will be provided for in-person attendees.


Elizabeth Smith joined the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation as its first Executive Director in 2013. Previously she held curatorial positions at Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. While at MOCA, Smith curated the exhibition Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses (1989) and authored subsequent publications on the Case Study Houses for Taschen. As well, she curated and co-organized such MOCA exhibitions as The Architecture of R.M. Schindler, At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture, and Urban Revisions: Current Projects for the Public Realm.

This program is sponsored by Capital Health. The 2025 Grand Homes and Gardens series is sponsored by Bryn Mawr Trust.

Thursday, March 20, 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm – Abuelita’s Kitchen with Dr. Sarah Portnoy

by

Join documentary filmmaker, activist, and scholar Dr. Sarah Portnoy to discuss her documentary and museum exhibit, Abuelita’s Kitchen. The event, part of the Pépin Lecture Series at Boston University, will take place at 6 pm at 808 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 124, in Boston. Free. You may reserve a spot through Eventbrite HERE.

This multimedia exhibition, led by USC professor Sarah Portnoy, shares the food stories of ten Indigenous, mestiza, Mexican-American, and Afro-Mexican grandmothers, or abuelas, in Los Angeles through photography, text, a documentary film, kitchen artifacts, family recipes, and audio stories. The exhibition examines food, identity, place, and culture, showing how these abuelas preserve traditions for future generations. 

Abuelita’s Kitchen: Mexican Food Stories features 22 photographs and one large map and 10 objects, including molcajetes, a comal, a tortilla press and more, one from each abuela in the exhibition. The exhibition explores the dishes the grandmothers make in their home kitchens, including chiles en nogada, mole, tamales, pozole, mixiotes, enchiladas, and more. Their migration stories are detailed in a colorful map of Mexico and L.A., while a final section of the exhibition presents their identities as traditional cooks, mothers, and grandmothers through photographs with their family members. Jessica Magaña-Sandoval is the exhibition’s photographer. A 28-minute documentary directed by Ebony Bailey, also called Abuelita’s Kitchen: Mexican Food Stories, will screen continuously at LA Cocina during the exhibition.  The project has an Instagram account, AbuelitasCooking. 

The exhibition reveals each abuela’s relationship to Mexican cuisine, their birthplaces in Mexico, and the city of Los Angeles, where the grandmothers live. For that, the 17 students of Portnoy´s USC Annenberg class, “Recording the Voices of Latinx Women & Food in Los Angeles: A Multimedia Oral History Project,” have created a website and audio stories and videos which will be available for viewing online on Telemundo’s streaming platform and on smart devices via QR codes. The audio and video tell the stories of these women, two of whom were born in the U.S., while the rest immigrated from places such as Mexico City, Puebla, Yucatán, Jalisco and Guerrero, bringing with them their knowledge of traditional dishes.