2025 Exhibitions

Searching for Serenity

November 1, 2025–January 4, 2026

Click here to see the exhibition catalogue.

Searching for Serenity explores how communities can harness the healing power of art and nature. A response to 2025 wildfire disasters in Los Angeles County, this exhibition bridges creativity with personal storytelling. Participating professional and community artists share how a deep connection to nature can serve as a tool for individual transformation, renewal, and collective recovery.

Descanso Gardens invited artists to submit their masterpieces to Searching for Serenity, an open juried competition and exhibition. Approximately 100 artworks will be on view at the Sturt Haaga Gallery November 1, 2025–January 4, 2026. Artists were asked to contemplate questions, such as what nature experience helps them feel grounded, what plant or place symbolizes healing or offers hope, and what landscape sparks the feeling of compassion, resilience or strength.

In addition to the open call, Searching for Serenity showcases Altadena artists who used creativity in their personal healing journey after 2025 wildfire disasters: 

Robert Lang presents a new art installation Vertical Pond III: From the Ashes. Inspired by past work, which was destroyed in the Eaton Fire, along with the artist’s home, studio, and artwork, the installation demonstrates connection and resurrection while paying homage to Descanso Gardens. 

Laura Parker’s new multi-media art installation Contest of Silence centers around a nearly missed testament to the persistence-of-life found within the cavity of the artist’s lost home. 

Delbar Shahbaz explores the tension between fragility and resilience in The Body Remembers the Land, a large-scale painting that invites viewers into a space of collective consciousness, where vulnerability becomes strength and the land remembers us in return.

The gardens also partnered with emerging filmmaker Zach Marks to explore and document the extensive loss and recovery efforts. Marks’ documentary Feathers captures the raw, personal stories of three artists in Searching for Serenity in the months following the event. Through intimate interviews with Laura Parker, Delbar Shahbaz, and Robert J. Lang, Marks documents a community grappling with profound loss. The film highlights the artists’ resilience and determination as they navigate the difficult, yet hopeful, path toward recovery.

Searching for Serenity and its programs are generously funded, in part, by Perenchio Foundation and an endowment from Heather Sturt Haaga and Paul G. Haaga, Jr.

The exhibition is open at the Sturt Haaga Gallery from November 1, 2025–January 4, 2026, 10am–4pm daily and is closed on December 25, 2025. Entry to the Gallery is included in the price of admission or membership.

Top photo: Robert Lang, Vertical Pond III: From the Ashes, 2025 (detail).

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Roots of Cool: A Celebration of Trees and Shade in a Warming World

July 12–October 12, 2025

Click here to see the outdoor map and here to see the exhibition catalogue.

Roots of Cool: A Celebration of Trees and Shade in a Warming World invites visitors to connect to and cultivate appreciation for the life-giving role trees and shade play in making urban neighborhoods livable.

In a warming world, shade and the cooling benefits of trees are essential, but not every community has the same access.

Outdoor installations throughout the gardens invite visitors to experience and contemplate the possibilities — from a series of imaginative bus stops exploring access to urban shade, to suspended repurposed tree umbrellas that serve as a metaphor for the vital cooling functions of trees, to a forest of wayfinding love letters in a time of climate change.

An accompanying group art exhibition at the Sturt Haaga Gallery and Boddy House explores the past, present, and future role of trees and shade in the city, with visual and musical works to inspire us to consider what kind of future we collectively envision.

Learn how policy and investment decisions can impact neighborhoods by checking out the tree equity score of different parts of Los Angeles. Find out which areas were previously “redlined” (a historical federal practice that denied home loan and insurance access to minority neighborhoods), and see how tree and shade cover inequities still persist today.

Roots of Cool is curated by Edith and Jolly de Guzman. Exhibiting artists include Robin Lasser, Leslie K. Gray, Chantée Benefield, Kim Abeles, Victoria Arriola, Pascaline Doucin-Dahlke, Cidne Hart, Diana Kohne, Lisa Tomczeszyn, Lois Keller, Sarita Zaleha, Shoshana Ben-Horin, Valerie Daval, and Yarnbombing LA.

This exhibition and its programs were curated in partnership with UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, University of California Division of Agriculture & Natural Resources, Los Angeles Center for Urban Natural Resources Sustainability, TreePeople, USDA Forest Service, Arroyo Arts Collective, The Nature of Cities, Avenue 50 Studio, USC Public Exchange, Dashboard.Earth, and Accelerate Resilience Los Angeles.

This exhibition and its programs are generously funded, in part, by Perenchio Foundation; Accelerate Resilience LA, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors; TreePeople; the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture; and an endowment from Heather Sturt Haaga and Paul G. Haaga, Jr.

Roots of Cool: A Celebration of Trees and Shade in a Warming World is open at the Sturt Haaga Gallery and Boddy House from July 12–October 12, 2025, 10am–4pm daily. Entry to the Gallery and Boddy House is included in the price of admission or membership.

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Daphne’s Wardrobe—Metamorphosis into Nature

March 1–June 1, 2025

Click here to see the exhibition catalogue.

Descanso Gardens presents Daphne’s Wardrobe—Metamorphosis into Nature, an interdisciplinary exhibition of artworks by women who explore body transformations into nature.

Daphne’s Wardrobe draws on mythologic and folklore narratives to examine themes of metamorphosis, revealing humanity’s deep connection to the natural world.

Curated by Carole Ann Klonarides, the exhibition features wearable garments, photography, sculpture, painting, and works on paper.

The “Daphne” of the title is the mythic nymph who was changed through metamorphosis into a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s advances. Her soft skin turned into bark, her hair grew into foliage, her arms into branches, and her feet into roots, making her earthbound.

Daphne’s Wardrobe will include the work of internationally-known artists Valerie Hammond, Adelle Lutz, Elana Herzog, Melissa Meier, Wangechi Mutu, Vibeke Sorensen, Alison Saar, Rina Banerjee, Phyllis Green, iris yirei hu, and Vera Lehndorff/Holger Trülzsch, who challenge us to rethink our deep connection to nature while also referencing the complex cultural histories—both constructive and destructive—that have shaped this relationship.

The Sturt Haaga Gallery and its programs are generously funded, in part, by Perenchio Foundation, Pasadena Art Alliance, and an endowment from Heather Sturt Haaga and Paul G. Haaga, Jr.

Daphne’s Wardrobe—Metamorphosis into Nature is open at the Sturt Haaga Gallery and Boddy House from March 1–June 1, 2025, 10am–4pm daily. Entry to the Gallery and Boddy House is included in the price of admission or membership.

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