Episodes

Getty’s podcast for kids and their families, If Objects Could Talk, is back for season 2! Listen as art leaves the museum vault and comes alive to share its own story. In this season, featuring objects from Getty's sculpture and decorative arts collection, each episode introduces listeners to the history, creation, and everyday use of incredible items like a rococo microscope, an inventive clock, and a majestic horse sculpture. Today, we’re sharing our episode on Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s sc...

Today, we're sharing the first episode of OMMM, Getty's newest podcast and first video podcast. This series encourages you to engage with works of art mindfully, wherever you are. Part art history, part mindfulness meditation, each episode focuses on one work of art and uses it as an inspiration for meditation and reflection. Long-time museum educator and meditation practitioner Lilit Sadoyan translates her work leading mindfulness meditation tours at the Getty Museum into a podcast that fits ...

Check out season two of ReCurrent, a Getty podcast about what we gain by keeping the past present. Hosted by Jaime Roque, this season explores cultural stories hidden in photographs, archives, and everyday places. Hear from artists, activists, and communities where Getty stories continue to unfold. On this episode, Backlot and Barrio, Jaime spends time with photographer George Rodriguez, whose camera moved between Hollywood’s backlots and Los Angeles’ East Side. He documented celebrity culture...

Check out Getty’s first podcast for kids and their families, If Objects Could Talk! Listen as artifacts leave the museum vault and come alive to share their side of the story. Featuring objects from Getty's antiquities collection, each episode introduces listeners to the history, creation, and everyday use of incredible items like an Egyptian cat statue, an ancient kind of dice, and a glass flask shaped like a fish. Voice actors and immersive sound design bring these historical fiction tales to...

Discover Getty’s latest podcast, ReCurrent, a series about what we gain by keeping the past present. In the debut episode, host and producer Jaime Roque embarks on a personal journey into his family’s heritage and explores the role of food in preserving cultural heritage. Check out the full series and learn more at getty.edu/recurrent. Be sure to follow and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Check out the newest season of Recording Artists, hosted by actor, artist, and futurist Ahmed Best. Explore the Getty archives and learn about the innovative art-science group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in season three, out now. This first episode of the season features Robert Rauschenberg, weaving archival recordings of the artist with new interviews by MoMA chief curator at large and publisher Michelle Kuo and cognitive-studies scientist Xiaodong Lin-Siegler. Learn more about...

Enjoy this episode from season 2 of Getty's other podcast, Recording Artists. This series features materials from Getty's archives. This season, titled Intimate Addresses, highlights artists' letters. To hear the rest of the season, subscribe to Recording Artists on your favorite podcast app or on our website here. In 1944, Frida Kahlo is at a crossroads, both in terms of her health and her career. In April of that year, with World War II dragging on, she writes to her gallerist—and former lov...

In Season 2 of Getty's podcast series Recording Artists, titled Intimate Addresses, each episode unpacks one letter from one artist, including Marcel Duchamp, Frida Kahlo, M. C. Richards, Benjamin Patterson, Nam June Paik, and Meret Oppenheim. Anna Deavere Smith reads the letters while our host, poet Tess Taylor, speaks with modern-day creators and historians to explore the artists’ lives. The season launches September 26, 2023. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app or learn more on our website...

“I think you can see that from my work, that I try to put everything I know in there and everything I don’t know. I’m looking for stuff that I don’t know, in that pursuit of, like, a daily practice.” Terrance Hayes is fascinated by creating records of daily life. With a background in visual art and poetry, he has a nuanced understanding of what constitutes writing and reading across mediums. His work as a teacher also touches everything he does. In this episode, hosted by Getty Research Instit...

“What I tell my students—and most of them are writers—is that the only way for them to get to a place where they’re making what they should be making, writing what they should be writing, is to work from a place of courage.” Claudia Rankine is a skilled poet, playwright, essayist, and professor. She explores, across genres, how the act of witnessing is necessary in maintaining the social contract. During this period of immense global change, witnessing as an act is a powerful act for artists, w...

“African American history is American history. You can’t tell it without talking about the contributions, the questions, the very heart of the creativity of African American culture.” As a poet and director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture , Kevin Young thinks a lot about how African American culture is a crucial part of American culture. From blues music to poetry, from cakewalk dances to Black Twitter, Young draws connections across time as he discu...

“Culture isn’t just dead stones and statues; culture is life. Culture is, you know, all the ways in which we move and interact together as peoples.” In 2005, the United Nations agreed to a new framework called Responsibility to Protect (R2P) aimed at preventing genocide and crimes against humanity. However, this norm neglected to protect cultural heritage explicitly, despite the fact that the destruction of cultural heritage, including intangible heritage such as traditions and religious practi...

“Protecting cultural heritage, like protecting civilians directly, had strategic import.” How does the presence of a cultural heritage site on the battlefield change wartime decision making? In 1944, as Allied generals postponed an attack on an Axis stronghold—located at the culturally important Catholic abbey Monte Cassino—they had to consider the potential for loss of life, the cultural significance of the abbey, the negative propaganda they would face for attacking a religious site, and the ...

“The society we now live in has been, in large measure, accomplished by destroying the cultural heritage of previous generations at various moments.” Cultural heritage is made up of the monuments, works of art, and practices that a society uses to define and understand itself and its history. The question of exactly which monuments or practices should be considered cultural heritage evolves as the society changes how it views itself—and, perhaps more importantly, how it views its future. This s...

"I know we call them art museums, but I think they’re really wellbeing centers, because people are coming in—maybe they don’t know that’s what’s about to happen—but you are helping them expand who they are, and give them these three feelings of awe, gratitude, and compassion, that are the keys to living a healthy and meaningful life." What exactly is the human mind? This question has occupied Dr. Dan Siegel since he entered the field of psychiatry in the 1980s. Drawing from his experiences on a...

“The museums give us these just incredible opportunities to have some kind of an encounter with different ways of seeing the world, shining a light on some aspect of our history or aspect of our humanity that opens up a new doorway for me to see things differently.” While mindfulness is often thought of as a solitary practice, law professor and meditation teacher Rhonda Magee believes in its power to support collective healing. It can bridge the divide between subjects like law or physics, whic...

“Mindfulness, for me, enables me to experience an art museum as if I’m listening to music. To just listen, attend to how all these objects make me feel.” How can mindfulness change our experience of art? Experienced meditation teacher and guide Tracy Cochran sees museums as perfect places to practice the lessons of mindfulness. From focusing on how an artwork impacts the feelings in her body to using the meditation techniques of “beginner’s mind” or “don’t know mind” to understand a work of art...

“Whenever I take people in there, I say—and it’s not a very large room—I say, ‘You’re now in the presence of millions and millions and millions of living beings. Fortunately, most of them are very small, and most of them are very dormant.’” In the late 1920s, Susanna Bixby Bryant founded a garden devoted to preserving the diverse native plants of California. Well ahead of her time and against the advice of experts, she crafted a garden showcasing plants from across the state. Today, the Califor...

“I’m after the charm of tomatoes. I’m after the history of tomatoes. Just obviously, appeal and taste and all of that. But if I can tie it up all in one bundle, that’s what I wanna choose.” Tomatoes are a nearly universal plant—native to South America, they now flourish on every continent except Antarctica. Tomatoes have been bred, often by home gardeners, for their looks, flavors, and suitability for diverse climates. This has resulted in thousands of varieties of heirloom tomatoes, meaning to...

“What it is that we do at Disneyland is tell stories. And the horticulture is a work of art helping to tell the story.” At Disneyland, elaborate, immaculate gardens spring to life literally overnight—four times a year. While plants might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about a theme park, these gardens are a crucial part of the Disneyland experience because they tell the story of place through plants. For instance, in the Star Wars-themed zone Galaxy’s Edge, exotic succ...

“I was there for the groundbreaking of the Getty Center. I was there for opening day of the Getty Center. I think for a lot of people, it said LA has arrived.” After nearly 15 years in the making, the Getty Center opened to much fanfare on December 16, 1997. Perched on a mountaintop with sweeping views of the surrounding city and coastline, the new campus quickly became an architectural and cultural landmark in Los Angeles. This year marks the Center’s 25th anniversary. In honor of this milesto...

“There was a lotta negativity because there was just pictures of Black people. That was one of the critiques, that we just photographed Black people. Said, ‘Yeah. You photograph just white people.’ That was the argument.” In New York City in 1963, a group of Black photographers came together, naming themselves the Kamoinge Workshop. Translated from the Kikuyu language, kamoinge means a group of people acting together. The artists indeed worked closely together, focusing on reflecting Black life...

"You know, everything is not just red, yellow, blue, and coming from a tube. It can be anything out there in the world. Grab it and use it." In 1956, artist Ed Ruscha left his home in Oklahoma and drove with his childhood friend to Los Angeles. Drawn to the city by its palm trees and apparent lack of an established art scene, Ruscha stayed to attend Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), where he aspired to be a sign painter. In the decades since, Ruscha has become a world-renowned artist, but ...

“The camera sort of teaches you to see in a really different way and to experience your environment in a different way, and to pay attention to the act of looking.” Photographer Uta Barth’s photographs focus on the act of looking. She has long been interested in creating images in which there is no discernable subject, but rather the image or light itself is the subject. Barth’s conceptual photographs examine how we see and how we define foreground and background. Her series are often long-term...