FIELD TRIP: Craft in America Center [8415 W. 3rd Street, Los Angeles 90048] EXHIBITION: "TOOLS OF THE TRADES: AMERICAN HANDMADE TOOLS AND DEVICES" with presentations by master blacksmith and tool expert Heather McLardy and collector Max Grossman.

The Craft in America Museum does not offer on-site parking. The closest parking structure is located at 8421 W 3rd Street.

More information about the event here at https://www.craftinamerica.org/exhibition/tools-of-the-trades. 

Annual RUSKIN BIRTHDAY BASH at Telescope Studio (downtown LA arts district) featuring poets Suzanne Lummis, Judith Pacht, and former LA City Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson. Cellist Allan Hon and pianist Alex Zhu will perform music by Rachmaninoff, Frank Bridge, Alex Zhu, and John Ruskin!

Suzanne Lummis' fourth collection, Crime Wave (Giant Claw), is included in Literary Hub's end-of-year 100 Notable Small Press Books, 2025, where reviewer Angela Chaidez Vincent called it "Savvy, Robust, Relentless."  She edited Poetry Goes to the Movies (Pacific Coast Poetry Series/Beyond Baroque Books) with well-known poets of L.A. and across the nation.  Both books were included in Mike Sonksen's 25 Best L.A. Centric Books of 2025 on the significant website L.A. Taco.  Her poems have appeared in noted literary journals and in The New Yorker.

Judith Pacht’s book Summer Hunger won the PEN Southwest Book Award for Poetry.  Her books  include Precarious (Giant Claw Press), Infirmary for a Private Soul (Tebot Bach Press) and five chapbooks. A three-time Pushcart nominee, Pacht was first place winner in the Georgia Poetry Society’s Edgar Bowers competition.  Her work appears in numerous anthologies and journals such as Ploughshares, Runes, Nimrod and Phoebe.  Her poems have been translated into Russian where they were published in Foreign Literature (Moscow, Russia).  Pacht reads at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, at Charleston’s Piccolo Spoleto Festival and has read and taught Political Poetry at Denver’s annual LitFest at the Lighthouse, and in Los Angeles at Beyond Baroque.

In addition to serving as Los Angeles’ 4th Poet Laureate, Lynne Thompson is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Blue on a Blue Palette (BOA Editions). She represented Los Angeles at the Marathon Poétique during the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. A lawyer by training, Thompson serves on the Boards of Scripps College, the Poetry Foundation, Los Angeles Review of Books and is President of Cave Canem. Recent work can be found or forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Georgia Review, and The Common.

The annual toast to Mr. Ruskin and a festive dessert reception following. An in-person event, open to the public. Parking available in front of the studio and in the valet parking lot across the street. Address: 2125 Bay Street, Los Angeles 90021.

In 1878, in the hours before he lost his hold on sanity in his villa on Coniston Water, John Ruskin looked at the Blakes on his walls and quoted from the poet artist's "Auguries of Innocence": "'And when gold and gems stud the plough.'  Oh—you dear Blake—and so mad too."  

Blake, like Ruskin, was a visionary, albeit one almost entirely ignored in his lifetime.  He only ever sold 61 copies of his Illuminated Books - artefacts that are now almost beyond price.  This sense of retained potency may be why his posthumous influence became so pervasive, explosive, even.  Ever since his reappraisal by Ruskin, Rossetti, and Yeats, Blake has become a radical bearer of new ways of making art that saw new visions of a world without slavery, tyranny and the abuse of humans and non-humans.  

Blake's celebration of gender-slipping sensuality and shape-shifting spirituality has been carried on a stream of fantastical conscious: from his Romantic origins through modernism and surrealism and onto the urgent priorities of our time.  In this wide-ranging, illustrated lecture, Philip Hoare explores this magical transformation, and shows how the transcendent power of Blake's art still holds our attention in the 21st century.

THE STORIES OF LA

Experience the diversity of stories that make Southern California such a place of discovery. A broad array of institutions and archives will have experts on hand to show off their collections and answer questions - anyone with an interest in the region’s history will find something of value!

The Ruskin Art Club will have a table at the bazaar and club members will be happy to greet you. Historical treasures from our Special Collections Archive will be on display as well as fine press pamphlets for sale and memorabilia.

The concept of labour stands at the very heart of Ruskin’s project. From his defence of the Pre-Raphaelites through his denunciation of capitalism and admiration for the ironworkers of Sheffield, to the utopian and dystopian visions of Fors Clavigera, Ruskin saw labour as the core both of ethics and aesthetics. This lecture argues that we have much to learn from Ruskin’s complex and constructive understanding of labour as a creative force.

Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. His book Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain was largely concerned with the writings of John Ruskin. He has published widely on the art of Britain and its empire and on American landscape painting. He has co-curated many international loan exhibitions including American Sublime, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde and Victorian Radicals. His writings on art and music have appeared in Art History and in edited collections. 

This event will be both ONLINE and IN PERSON at USC.
Address: Doheny Memorial Library, 3550 Trousdale Parkway, Friends Lecture Hall (2nd floor, Room 240), Los Angeles, CA 90089.

Each year the Ruskin Society of North America, in conjunction with the Ruskin Art Club, presents its Ruskin Lifetime Achievement Award to a figure in the contemporary world of Ruskin studies who has made a significant and sustained contribution to the appreciation of Ruskin's vision in our day. Dinah Birch is a scholar, teacher, and writer on Ruskin and Victorian Literature, based at the University of Liverpool, with a special focus on Ruskin's role in the advancement of women in the 19th and 20th centuries. She delivered our Ruskin Lecture at USC in 2023 on Ruskin and Women.  

Tributes will be from Robert Hewison, Sharon Weltman, Rachel Dickinson, Sara Atwood.

Please join us for an intriguing talk on the history of stained glass in its context by Dr. Virginia Raguin. Raguin examines windows from iconic locations such as the cathedrals of Chartres, Canterbury, and Cologne; Paris’ Sainte Chapelle; Swiss guild halls; the Pink Mosque in Iran; Tiffany’s chapel for the World Columbian Exposition; and Frank Lloyd Wright’s homes in California. She discusses the site-specific decisions made during each era of production. The art of stained glass emerges not from a single creator. Instead, it results from the collaborative interplay among the physical site, the desires of the patron, the need for clarity for the viewer, the technological possibilities of the medium, and the dominant artistic styles of the time.

Many of Raguin's publications focus on stained glass, both historic and modern, as in Stained Glass from its Origins to the Present with Abrams (USA) and Thames and Hudson (GB) in 2003. A member of the International Corpus Vitrearum, Raguin has co-authored Stained Glass before 1700 in the Midwest United States (Harvey Miller Press, London, 2002). Raguin also wrote the catalogue essay for Kiki Smith's exhibition in the Pace Gallery, New York: Kiki Smith: Lodestar, 2010. Raguin is currently working on Stained Glass before 1700 in California (vol. 1, Los Angeles). Stained Glass: Radiant Art, a richly illustrated guide to the collection of medieval and Renaissance stained glass in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, was published in 2013. Most recently, she is the author of The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Time (Reaktion Books, 2024). From over 30 years of collaborative exchange with colleagues in 20 countries, Raguin has been deeply involved in questions of conservation and the commitment of maintaining historic sites as essential aspects of culture. 

The perfect summer event: Gallery owner and thorough Ruskinian Stuart Denenberg presents the art of Pre-Raphaelite Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919), a cache of rare Whistler documents, a Ruskin portrait and other treasures recently acquired by Denenberg Fine Arts – plus a gallery tour. RSVP here. 

This talk, drawn from Usher's new book Following Nature's Lead: Ancient Ways of Living in a Dying World (Princeton University Press, 2025), highlights how Ruskin’s “upcycling” of the classical past informs his views on political economy in Unto This Last. His admiration for  Xenophon’s Oeconomicus is well known. Here I elucidate several other connections that have gone largely unobserved: Ruskin’s debt to Aristotle’s critique of money in the Politics, Plato’s arguments about just distribution in the Republic, and Hesiod’s notion of productive limits to wealth in the Works and Days. I also unpack Ruskin’s allusion to a story about the Gracchi, champions of artisans and agriculturalists in Republican Rome, and his approval of Horace’s castigation of the pursuit of private luxury at the expense of the public good.

M. D. Usher is the Lyman-Roberts Professor of Classical Languages and Literature and a member of the Department of Geography and Geosciences, the Environmental Program, and the Food Systems Graduate Program at the University of Vermont and a Companion in the Guild of St. George. His latest book, Following Nature's Lead: Ancient Ways of Living in a Dying World, has just been published by Princeton University Press. His previous books include Plato’s Pigs & Other Ruminations: Ancient Guides to Living with Nature (Cambridge, 2020) and three books in Princeton’s Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series, including How to Care about Animals, How to Say No, and How to Be a Farmer. Usher and his wife own and operate a farm in Shoreham, Vermont.

Please join us for an intriguing talk on the history of stained glass in its context by Dr. Virginia Raguin. Raguin examines windows from iconic locations such as the cathedrals of Chartres, Canterbury, and Cologne; Paris’ Sainte Chapelle; Swiss guild halls; the Pink Mosque in Iran; Tiffany’s chapel for the World Columbian Exposition; and Frank Lloyd Wright’s homes in California. She discusses the site-specific decisions made during each era of production. The art of stained glass emerges not from a single creator. Instead, it results from the collaborative interplay among the physical site, the desires of the patron, the need for clarity for the viewer, the technological possibilities of the medium, and the dominant artistic styles of the time.

After the lecture, please join us for light refreshments and a tour of Judson Studios' state-of-the-art glass fusing studio with David Judson, where you can see the current projects underway.

Many of Raguin's publications focus on stained glass, both historic and modern, as in Stained Glass from its Origins to the Present with Abrams (USA) and Thames and Hudson (GB) in 2003. A member of the International Corpus Vitrearum, Raguin has co-authored Stained Glass before 1700 in the Midwest United States (Harvey Miller Press, London, 2002). Raguin also wrote the catalogue essay for Kiki Smith's exhibition in the Pace Gallery, New York: Kiki Smith: Lodestar, 2010. Raguin is currently working on Stained Glass before 1700 in California (vol. 1, Los Angeles). Stained Glass: Radiant Art, a richly illustrated guide to the collection of medieval and Renaissance stained glass in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, was published in 2013. Most recently, she is the author of The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Time (Reaktion Books, 2024). From over 30 years of collaborative exchange with colleagues in 20 countries, Raguin has been deeply involved in questions of conservation and the commitment of maintaining historic sites as essential aspects of culture. 

Event Details

Location: Fused & Kiln Formed Glass
143 Pasadena Ave.
South Pasadena, CA 91030

Pricing: $20 ( + $3.18 Eventbrite fee) for Non-Members / $10 for Ruskin Art Club Members and California Art Club Members

RSVP required; limited seating.

Claudio Silveira Amaral studied architecture at the School of Architecture and Urbanism of PUC-Campinas, the Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas. He has a master’s degree and a PhD from the University of São Paulo. He did post-PhD studies at THE RUSKIN in Lancaster University, UK, and a post-PhD in the RUI BARBOSA FOUNDATION in Rio de Janeiro. His thesis was on John Ruskin and the teaching of drawing in Brazil, later published as a book by Editora UNESP in Portuguese and in English by The Edwin Mellen Press. He also wrote a book entitled Rui Barbosa: a Reader of John Ruskin. The author of many wide-ranging essays and articles on architecture, Ruskin, and Brazil, he is a retired professor at UNESP, São Paulo State University.

This lecture is Ruskin Art Club’s annual Ada Louise Huxtable Lecture on Architecture.

LOCATION:
Wende Museum
10808 Culver Blvd., Culver City 90230

This event will also be available on livestream on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/live/VOlqb8cdSDg?si=lvnd6xcoZEryv8kk.

Join us on Saturday, March 8th, 2025, from 1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. for our March General Membership Meeting. This month’s program, presented by Gabriel Meyer of the Ruskin Club, focuses on the Victorian-era writer, philosopher, and art critic John Ruskin (1819 – 1900) and the “Father of the National Parks”, American naturalist, author and, environmental philosopher,  John Muir. 

Art History Presentation: Gain insight into the life, works, influence and relationship between John Ruskin’s work and John Muir through a captivating presentation. Gabriel Meyer examines the ways Ruskin’s ideas influenced pioneering naturalist John Muir (1838-1914) and American environmentalism at the turn of the 20th century. While Muir himself was not one of the original Concord Transcendentalists, he knew and engaged with them and brought their ideas to bear on his work to chronicle and save the American wilderness. At the center of this lecture is a meditation on the significance of mountain landscapes for both Ruskin and Muir and their starkly contrasting views of what such alpine landscapes say about the interaction of Nature and the human. The lectures ends with a provocative look at the “problem of the picturesque” and at the invitation Ruskin extends to us, even today, to pursue a deep and comprehensive ecological vision, one that postulates that ecological repair and renewal is only possible in the context a radical moral and cultural transformation of human life.

Networking and Socializing: Connect with fellow CAC members in a relaxed and vibrant atmosphere. Share your insights, experiences, and passion for art while enjoying the company of like-minded individuals.

 Refreshments: Enjoy light refreshments and beverages as you immerse yourself in an enriching exploration of art and environmentalism. 

Event Details

Ticket Price: CAC Members $25 ($28.52 w/ $3.52 Fee), Non-members $35 ($39.19 w/ $4.19 Fee), Zoom $15 ($17.85 w/$2.85 Fee)

Location: CAC Headquarters, 65 South Grand Avenue, Second Floor, Pasadena, CA 91105

Note: In-Person tickets are limited, so reserve your spot today!
Please RSVP on the California Art Club website here in addition to below: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mountain-gloommountain-glory-ruskin-and-john-muir-tickets-1234012878739?aff=oddtdtcreator.

For more event details check out the California Art Club website here.

Location: Telescope Studio, 2125  Bay Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021

Lynne Thompson was the Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles (21-22). Her most recent collection of poems, Fretwork, was selected by Jane Hirshfield for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and published in 2019. The author of Beg No Pardon and Start With A Small Guitar, her work has been widely published and anthologized including in Massachusetts Review, Rust & Moth, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry 2020, to name a few. Thompson sits on the Boards of Directors of Cave Canem and the Los Angeles Review of Books and is Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College.

Former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, David St. John has been honored, over the course of his career, with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including both the Rome Fellowship and the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O.B. Hardison Prize for teaching and poetic achievement from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the George Drury Smith Lifetime Achievement Award from Beyond Baroque. He is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including The Last Troubadour: Selected and New Poems. David St. John is also the author of a volume of essays, interviews, and reviews entitled Where the Angels Come Toward Us (1995) and is co-editor of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (2009). St. John has written libretti for the opera, THE FACE, and for the choral symphony, THE SHORE. David St John is USC's professor of English and Comparative Literature and Interim Chair of the Department of Art History.

Concert with Tiffany Chung, violin; Allan Hon, cello, and Alex Zhu, piano, playing Ruskin (!), Mozart, and Meyer. Reception following.

Join us for Ruskin’s 206th birthday festivities in the heart of LA’s downtown arts district!