Opening of The Tender Land
Pasadena Museum of History
Mayor Bill Bogaard
October 9, 2004
 

It is a great honor for me to participate in The Tender Land Opening Day celebration, an event of importance and great accomplishment. The Tender Land is truly an auspicious program, which reflects in a wonderful way on Pasadena’s strength as a center for arts and culture.

This is a celebration of art, culture, science and history with the active involvement of more than 25 community organizations. The partners in this effort are offering an interpretation of nature through time and across cultures, embracing tradition and technology and built on the theme of the timeless, fragile complexity of the natural world and the unique power of art, culture and science to enlighten, educate and inspire.

I can think of no better way to describe The Tender Land experience that starts with this event than to refer to the following words which appear in the Festival Guide:

“You will travel from 500-year-old Chinese landscapes through our meandering Arroyo Seco watershed to a futuristic garden lab. You will hear the sounds of the earth in unusual musical instruments, through the minds of nature-inspired composers and played by earth forces themselves. You will tiptoe through a fog grotto, ponder the impact of human society on the land, and lose yourself in the impossible beauty of a bird in flight.”

I see this program as so important because it represents a major collaboration, a high quality, and an elegant commitment.

This program was created by a group of 14 prestigious institutions with many other participating community organizations. This kind of collaboration is unheard of in most communities, is unusual on the part of arts and cultural organizations, but it is common in Pasadena. I congratulate all who are participating in The Tender Land for their spirit of collaboration to accomplish the program.

The quality of this program is evident from a reading of the events that make it up and a reflection on the prestigious institutions that have put it together.
And the program represents a commitment by those organizations to share the best that they have to offer to an ever increasing audience. I am confident this commitment will be rewarded.

When you think of the history of this great cultural tradition, you can not help but be impressed.

Just a few years ago, in 1999, a cooperative arts event was offered under the name, “Radical Past”. As I recall, this involved 6 Pasadena organizations, which agreed to offer free admission on a Friday night if the City provided a tram service to facilitate visits to their institutions. Two years later under a program called “Universe”, twice as many organizations were involved in a similar program that lasted a longer period of time. This ongoing dialogue among the great institutions of the City has now elaborated into what is opening today as The Tender Land.

I congratulate all who are involved and congratulate the City for the wealth of resources that allows this program to occur.