The itinerant lives of two ceilings from Spain

In 2014 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) received a gift of thirty-six wooden ceiling panels from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). The panels, which had been installed in the university’s Faculty Club, were rumored to have once been owned by the American media mogul and renowned collector William Randolph Hearst, but little was known about them beyond this local legend. This article reconstructs the ceilings’ itinerant histories, particularly the early- and mid-twentieth-century American context in which they were purchased, circulated, and used by their previous owners. From their initial construction to their sale and reuse in two separate contexts, the LACMA ceilings were appropriated into several projects that sought to convey new national, local, and personal identities informed by an imagined Spanish past.