Habitat

Exhibition considers landscape painting from the late 19th and early 20th century as a time capsule of California's natural environment.

UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art presents Habitat: Making the California Environment, a fall exhibition exploring California’s ecological past and its contemporary resonances. Featuring more than 40 artworks drawn from the museum’s collection and loans from The James Irvine Swinden Family Collection, Habitat highlights a critical period in the state’s environmental history—after European settlement but before the sweeping transformations brought by urbanization.

Rather than illustrating natural history, the exhibition considers how artists shaped perceptions of California’s landscapes, drawing connections between art, ecology, and cultural identity. Organized into thematic clusters, the works invite viewers to see familiar terrains anew and to reflect on enduring issues such as invasive species, preservation, and the climate impacts of human activity.

Curated by Dr. James Nisbet, professor and chair of Art History and Visual Studies at UC Irvine, the show reveals how painting and photography from a century ago illuminate the entanglement of aesthetic, colonial, and ecological forces.

Themes and highlights

Native Blooms
This section celebrates California’s most iconic flowers—golden poppies and lupines. John M. Gamble’s Calce de Oro (Poppy Field near Banning) (c. 1939) enshrines the poppy as a symbol of California identity, while Angel Espoy’s Untitled (Poppies, Lupines and Cows) (c. 1914) portrays a balance of agriculture and wildflower fields. The lupine’s history is especially revealing: once maligned as destructive, it is now recognized as ecologically beneficial, showing how scientific understanding evolves alongside cultural imagery.

Orange County
Landscapes of Orange County trace both natural beauty and suburban encroachment. Curtis Chamberlin’s The Old Coast Road (Arch Beach Road) (1915) contrasts with photographs of the same area a decade earlier, showing new houses and gardens altering coastal terrain. Contemporary artist Andrew Weathers reimagines these historic views in Landscape Hocket (Orange County) (2025), a sound work capturing the environmental changes of beaches and grasslands over the past century. His project incorporates acoustic recordings and sonifications of now-rare native grasses, underscoring how development and introduced species have transformed local ecosystems.

California Missions
This section reflects on the Spanish missions’ dual legacy. Long romanticized, these sites are now recognized for the profound disruption they brought to Indigenous communities and environments. Mission gardens also introduced invasive plants such as black mustard, which continues to reshape ecosystems and intensify wildfire risks. Julie Mathilde Morrow De Forest’s In the Mission Garden, San Juan Capistrano (1928) depicts bougainvillea and fan palms, plants that remain culturally resonant symbols of status and ornament while revealing colonial imprints on California’s flora.

Mountains
California’s mountain regions, rugged and dramatic, reveal ecological shifts tied to climate change. Marion Wachtel’s Long Lake, Sierra Nevada (c. 1929) depicts both Jeffrey and Whitebark pines, species now moving in opposite elevational directions due to rising temperatures. Raymond Yelland’s Donner Lake (1890) similarly highlights alpine ecosystems under stress. Recent UC research has found Jeffrey pines growing at unprecedented altitudes—an indicator of how global warming is reshaping even seemingly remote habitats.

Arboreal Landscapes
This section celebrates California’s trees, from towering redwoods to imported eucalyptus. Harry Best’s Redwoods (c. 1910) conveys the sublime scale of native forests, while Paul Lauritz’s September Eucalyptus (1923) reflects the ambivalent legacy of introduced species: admired for their beauty but associated with failed lumber experiments and heightened fire risk. These works underscore how trees embody both cultural symbolism and ecological complexity.

Interdisciplinary perspectives
To enrich the exhibition, Dr. Nisbet collaborated with Justin Felder, a California Certified Field Botanist and UC Irvine graduate student in the Master of Conservation and Restoration Science program. Felder’s expertise provided botanical identifications and ecological context, situating the artworks within deeper histories of environmental change.

About the curator
Dr. James Nisbet is Professor and Chair in the Department of Art History and PhD Program in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. A leading scholar of ecocritical art history, his publications include Second Site (Princeton University Press, 2021) and, as co-editor, The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land, and the Politics of Environment (UC Press, 2021). Habitat: Making the California Environment marks his curatorial debut with the Langson Museum.