Michaëla Mohrmann, curator at UC Irvine’s Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art (IMCA), led California art enthusiasts on a guided tour of the museum’s gallery and summer exhibition “California Kinship: Painting Homelife in the Golden State Before 1940” on Saturday, July 26. The program “Rooted in Art: Planting and Painting in the California Garden” also took place on that Saturday.
The exhibition focused on California’s domestic life in the first part of the 20th century, an era unique for its upheaval and cultural transitions.
This time period intrigued Mohrmann, a former student of modern and contemporary art. Mohrmann graduated from Harvard, received her Ph.D from Columbia and has been an Andrew Mellon Museum Research Consortium Curatorial Fellow at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
“It really looks at sort of the policies that were passed by the progressive movement, the Progressive Era, at the turn of the century, really up until the Great Depression, and how those policies expanded people’s understanding of kinship, mutual care and the common good much more socialist in its orientation than what we had seen before,” Mohrmann told New University.
The program “Rooted in Art” also sought to capture important changes of the early 20th century; the gallery at IMCA provided a discussion on the “plants and gardening styles depicted in plein air paintings on view.”
The term “plein air” comes from the French for “open air”. An artist leaves the studio to paint outside, in the midst of his or her setting.
This event was chosen, says Mohrmann, because of the exhibit’s landscape-focused works. Additionally, the horticultural focus pairs well with concerns over climate change and UCI’s STEM-oriented student body.
Despite the modern relevancies of the program, the conjunction of art and gardening was an important facet of the historical moment.
“In fact, a lot of the plein air painters of that time were avid gardeners. They were creating gardens in which they painted and that were the subject matter of their paintings. They were featured in magazines like Country Life or Home and Garden and they became sort of middle-class heroes for most Americans who could really appreciate their work ethic, both in the studio and in the garden,” Mohrmann said.
The American middle class gained new access to domestic hobbies like gardening in the first half of the twentieth century. Much of this grew out of the City Beautiful Movement at the turn of the century, which emphasized beautifying American homes and urban spaces through gardens.
This was not the only important social change in the early 1900s, though. Progressive reforms — coupled with new business enterprises — improved the lives and salaries of workers, immigrants and people living in the slums.
These changes were felt especially by women, who gained the right to vote as well as new roles in the workforce during and after World War I— leading to discourse on their role within contemporary society.
The ICMA exhibition highlights California as a catalyst for much of this change, with the state funding public kindergartens, granting women suffrage in 1911 and providing loans that enabled the working class new access to home-owning. Works on display by Jean Mannheim, Belle Baranceanu, Edouard Vysekal and others capture the faces, emotions and legacies of many who lived through the time.
Though the exhibition focuses on a specific historical period, its themes and paintings remain pertinent today, Mohrmann said.
“I would say that even the social problems that were not fully resolved during the Progressive [Era] are still with us, like we’re still seeing a lot of deportation campaigns and an [anti] immigrant sentiment, which was definitely something that was happening during that era and that some of the paintings referred to,” Mohrmann said. “I think that there’s much we can learn from this moment in time and how we can organize collectively to demand a better outcome for all, and that prosperity is really prosperity when it’s shared.”
California Kinship will end August 30. Those interested in attending can visit the museum’s website for more information.
Aidan Wyrough is a Features Intern for the summer 2025 quarter. He can be reached at awyrough@uci.edu.
Edited by Peyton Arthur and Annabelle Aguirre
Editor’s Note: Two typo errors were fixed in the last quotation.