MFAH Antiques Dealers Association Annual Lecture

In 2025, the MFAH acquired by gift two rare, rediscovered pieces of Greene & Greene furniture from the architects’ famed 1907 Blacker House, a masterwork of Arts & Crafts architecture in Pasadena, California. Dispersed in a yard sale with other contents from the house in 1947, the music cabinet and chair were bought by a Texas family and remained in that collection until they were donated to the Museum. The cabinet is a unique piece, made specifically for the living room of the historic house.

This lecture positions the Blacker House as the culmination of the Greenes’ Arts & Crafts architecture—with the Museum’s recent acquisitions from the house providing a lens on the brothers’ design philosophy. In their “ultimate bungalows” in Pasadena, the architects created a distinctly Californian architecture that fused British Arts & Crafts ideals, American vernacular traditions, and Asian aesthetic principles. Close analysis reveals the Blacker House as the epitome of a fully realized Gesamtkunstwerk, where architecture, furnishings, and landscape were conceived as an integrated whole.

About the Speaker
Wendy Kaplan has been at LACMA since 2001 as the department head and curator of decorative arts and design. She has held curatorial positions at the Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami, Glasgow Museums in Scotland, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A leading expert on late 19th- and 20th-century design, she has authored, co-authored, or edited books including Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985 and California Design, 1930–1965: “Living in a Modern Way.” Kaplan is currently organizing the exhibition Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias for LACMA.