CITY OF INDUSTRY, Calif. — The John Rowland Mansion sits landlocked in a sea of concrete and asphalt, hemmed in by warehouses, almost invisible to the general public, and accessible solely by the parking zone of the La Puente College District’s administrative workplaces. Make your means inside, nonetheless, and also you’ll discover pictures, art work, furnishings, and different objects that provide home windows into the historical past of California within the mid-Nineteenth century, earlier than it was even a part of america. And now, a sequence of up to date artwork interventions is respiration new life into the constructing.
Unveiled this previous weekend, the challenge is the results of months of collaboration between the Home Museum, a nonprofit based in 2022 whose mission combines historic preservation, group engagement, and site-specific installations, and the La Puente Valley Historic Society (LPVHS), which oversees the John Rowland Mansion.
“It match the {qualifications} for a challenge web site: itemizing on a historic register, some type of bodily emptiness, and an openness to conceptual artwork intervention,” Home Museum founder Evan Curtis Charles Corridor informed Hyperallergic. The group has beforehand collaborated with the Henry O. Tanner Home in Philadelphia; the Jesse A. Tilge Home in Mount Ethereal, Pennsylvania; and the Kuindzhi Artwork Museum in Mariupol, Ukraine.
In 1841, John Rowland and William Workman led a mule prepare from Taos, New Mexico to Southern California, one of many earliest cases of American settlement within the area. Rowland settled within the San Gabriel Valley simply east of Los Angeles, changing into a outstanding rancher and service provider (the unincorporated group of Rowland Heights is called after him). Regardless of his Anglo surname, Rowland had twin American-Mexican citizenship — he was sometimes called Don Juan Rowland — and his household had been thought of Californios, or Latino residents of California, whose presence right here predates the state’s annexation by america in 1848 following the Mexican-American Struggle.
In 1855, he constructed a house for his household in what’s now the Metropolis of Trade, which nonetheless stands because the oldest surviving brick construction in Southern California and was added to the Nationwide Register of Historic Locations in 1973. Initially, the solitary Greek Revival home stood out amid acres of bucolic panorama that made up Rowland’s sprawling rancho. Now, it has been lowered to a modest oasis of bygone eras amid strip malls and delivery services.
Corridor first reached out to Amy Rowland, a sixth-generation descendant of John A. Rowland I and the president of LPVHS, in January, the beginning of discussions in regards to the particular circumstances and wishes of the location.
“Every historic landmark requires its personal strategy to revitalization, which on this case concerned social apply along with the creation of bodily artworks,” Corridor mentioned.
“We’ve been very lucky to respect one another and actually pay attention,” Rowland informed Hyperallergic. “I’ve been apprehensive about sure issues, however [Hall] reassures me. He’s been an exquisite assist.”
After a number of web site visits and conversations with the LPVHS, Corridor tapped LA-based artists David Horvitz and Emily Barker to create site-specific works. “They each have beneficiant artwork practices which have been utilized in service of others,” Corridor mentioned. “When working with delicate materials, like household historical past, it’s essential for the artists to conceptualize works that assist the individuals whose legacies will probably be impacted by them.”
Horvitz’s contribution concerned planting a number of native California walnut saplings on the property, with symbolic objects buried beneath. He collaborated with panorama agency Terremoto to create a meandering path of classic bricks discovered onsite. The encompassing space was beforehand a serious walnut rising hub, with town of La Puente Valley being house to the most important walnut packing manufacturing facility on this planet within the early twentieth century. (There may be even a close-by metropolis named Walnut.)
“Sooner or later, it may be a spot of assembly, congregation, dialogue, reflection,” Horvitz informed Hyperallergic. He positioned a plaque bearing a line from a poem by Scottish writer Maria Sledmere: “Let’s make a brand new backyard from outdated wounds.”
Barker typically addresses incapacity and entry of their works, topics that come from their private expertise of utilizing a wheelchair. Buildings in California should adhere to ADA rules, nonetheless buildings with historic designations will be exempt.
“My first ideas interacting with any house are at all times the identical: ‘Is there a protected option to get in?’” Barker mentioned in an interview with Hyperallergic. “I attempt to gauge the extent of non-public funding that house has. In a whole lot of cases, the organizers of an area is not going to need to make any lodging, however they had been open to my suggestion for accessibility.” Barker’s piece “Entry is a needn’t a present” (2024) features a designated handicapped accessible parking house and a wheelchair ramp main into the constructing.
“I simply need this group house to be accessible to the group,” they mentioned.
On the mansion’s second ground, Corridor created readymade artworks utilizing interval furnishings and doorways discovered on web site, reframing these home gadgets inside a up to date context. A everlasting exhibition of Rowland household historical past curated by Amy Rowland will be seen on the bottom ground, that includes objects, work, pictures, and ephemera that inform the intertwined tales of the household and the encircling space as they developed over the previous almost two centuries.
The Home Museum collaboration kicked off final Saturday, July 20, with performances by the normal Mexican dance troupe Ballet Folklorico Popurri and singer-songwriter Taylor Sackson.
Rowland hopes this transformation will carry extra consideration, and funding, to the historic web site, in order that it may possibly higher serve the wants of the area people, offering excursions and schooling to teams of scholars and different guests.
“This place feels prefer it’s outdoors of time. It’s not 2024, not 1855, someway in the course of all these completely different instances,” Corridor mentioned. “You decide up an object and also you’re transported, you place it down and also you’re again right here. There’s one other actuality that’s going down.”
