Episodes

“Photography, historically, has been used to pin people of color in a particular location to a particular identity or stereotype, and the artists in this exhibition work to unpin that.” Photography is a uniquely accessible and flexible medium today, encompassing everything from cell-phone snapshots to large-format negatives, from formal studio sets to casual selfies. Nonetheless, photographs of people of color have historically played on negative stereotypes and fixed identities. In the exhibit...

“He often said is that this was a garden not for the visitors. He was happy if visitors enjoyed it; it was a garden for the people who worked here, who every single day, would see the slight changes and would have a seasonal experience.” The largest work of art at the Getty Center is located outside the galleries—the Central Garden, designed by artist Robert Irwin. The garden stretched Irwin’s understanding of what art could be; it is alive and changing with every passing moment. In the nearly ...

"For Blake, visionary art is not mysterious or fuzzy or soft. Visionary art is something which actually very precise and crisp." Painter, poet, draftsman, and printmaker William Blake was born in London in 1757, a time when England’s art scene was growing and transforming dramatically. Blake trained as an engraver, eventually developing his own technique that allowed him to combine word and image in colorful works. Blake used this approach to illustrate poems he composed and began to publish li...

"It was really powerful to be on the road following her footsteps. It just gave me an incredibly profound respect for her grit." In the 1930s and ‘40s, photographer Dorothea Lange drove up and down California and across the American West, recording people and their living conditions with her camera and notepad. Eighty years later, poet Tess Taylor saw echoes of Lange’s photographs of temporary housing, migrant labor, and precarious livelihoods in contemporary California. Taylor retraced Lange’s...

"From what we know, the earliest form of true writing was that invented in Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium BC. Closely followed by Egypt, not long after. It’s probably only a matter of a couple of hundred years, if that. But Mesopotamia seems to have it by a nose." Mesopotamia, the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was home to some of the world’s first cities. Beginning around 3400 BC, people came together in this region to build elaborately decorated buildings, fo...

"They were rather shocked that we were interested specifically in restoring art by women. And I remember one specific curator said, 'Well, if you would just open your base to men as well, we would have a lot of worthy things for you to restore.'" Where are the women artists in museums? The non-profit organization Advancing Women Artists was inspired by this simple, powerful question. Though artists like Artemisia Gentileschi and Plautilla Nelli were prolific and successful in their lifetimes, t...

“Schlosser could be described as the least-known famous art historian.” In the 16th and 17th centuries, Central European nobles gathered and displayed art and natural wonders side by side in spaces known as art and curiosity cabinets, or kunst- und Wunderkammer. Viewers were awed by the spectacle of traditional fine artworks alongside objects like ostrich eggs in elaborate stands, complex mechanical clocks, suits of armor, and calligraphic manuscripts. In 1908 Austrian curator and scholar Juliu...

"There is, and appropriately so, a tension between Sarnath as an archaeological monument, a historical monument, but also a highly sacred one." After reaching enlightenment, the Buddha began attracting followers—and founding a religion—by preaching. He delivered his first sermon at Sarnath, near the banks of the Ganges in Northeast India, in the 6th century BCE. By the 3rd century BCE, it had become a site of considerable importance; the emperor Ashoka visited and erected a gleaming pillar, off...

“The idea is that you put the scroll in the machine and it does a pirouette. And as it turns around, the x-rays see what’s inside the scroll from every possible angle, 360 degrees, all the way around. And we can invert that and recover a complete representation of what’s inside, in three dimensions.” In 1750 well diggers discovered a villa near the ancient town of Herculaneum that had been buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Among the treasures pulled from the villa were more tha...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short, personal reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, Maite Alvarez, who works on exhibitions at the museum, recalls how she discovered a Baroque sculpture's true maker—Luisa Roldán. To learn more about this sculpture, visit: www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/1101/. Transcript JAMES CUNO: Hi, I’m Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust. ...

"One of the things I’ve heard most frequently in attending and working with and participating with ACHAC at different events, is to hear young people, and even adults, say, 'I had no idea. I did not know that back at this particular historical juncture, my ancestors were put on display in the city, in these parts, for entertainment.'" During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, France taught its citizens about its overseas territories in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and Asia through...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short, personal reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, Museum editor Lyra Kilston muses on Richard Neutra's innovative and newly relevant school designs, as seen through photographs by Julius Shulman. To learn more about these images, visit: https://primo.getty.edu/permalink/f/mlc5om/GETTY_ROSETTAIE131574. Transcript JAMES CUNO: Hi, I’m Jim Cuno, p...

"It became Hoefnagel’s task to think of illuminations that were every bit as extraordinary as this amazing writing." The exquisite Renaissance manuscript Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta, or Monument of Miraculous Calligraphy, is the result of a unique partnership between two different artists working thirty years apart. From 1561 to 1562 the master calligrapher Georg Bocskay created a book in which he demonstrated hundreds of elaborate scripts in many different languages and alphabets. More than f...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short, personal reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, curatorial research assistant Alex Jones is reminded of his grandmother by a photograph of a Black woman at a 1965 civil rights protest. To view this work visit: https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/reflections-alex-jones-on-charles-brittin/. To learn more about this photography, visit: http://blogs.gett...

With an artistic career that began with political cartoons in his college newspaper, Romare Bearden moved between mediums and styles throughout his life, although his artistic breakthroughs did not come without hard work. Over the course of a long career that spanned a tumultuous period in the fight for representation and civil rights for African Americans in the United States, Bearden became a deeply influential artist. Art historian Mary Schmidt Campbell delves into Bearden’s fascinating life ...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short, personal reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, educator Laura Gavilán Lewis considers what it means to be separated from her loved ones as she looks at a portrait of Zénaïde and Charlotte Bonaparte. To learn more about this work, visit: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/802/. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every ...

Hemos pedido al personal del Getty que compartan con nosotros sus reflexiones personales sobre las obras de arte, en tanto que nos podrían contar historias acerca de nuestra vida diaria. Esta semana, Laura Gavilán Lewis del departamento de educación habla de su experiencia de separación de sus seres queridos a través de un retrato de Zénaïde y Charlotte Bonaparte. Para aprender más de esta pintura, visite: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/ 802 /. Transcripción Laura Gavilán Lewis:...

"I still cannot believe why the people all around the world—the public people, I mean, the governments or UNESCO, the UN, the others involved in the culture or in humanity—why they do nothing to preserve Palmyra, to stop the attack of the militants of Daesh." By the 3rd century CE, the ancient city of Palmyra, also known as Tadmur in Arabic, was a global crossroads, where caravans from Mesopotamia, Persia, China, Rome, and Europe exchanged both goods and beliefs. During the Roman era, Palmyra f...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short, personal reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, metadata specialist Kelly Davis longs for a hike in the Sierras as she views an 1871 photograph by Timothy O'Sullivan. To learn more about this work, visit: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/40204/. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every other Tuesday. Transcript JAM...

"He was a great artistic personality, crucial for the development, in some way, of what we think as the modern science. But he was not alone." Leonardo da Vinci died more than 500 years ago, but he is still revered as a genius polymath who painted beguiling compositions like the Mona Lisa, avidly studied the natural sciences, and created designs and inventions in thousands of journal pages. Even during Leonardo’s lifetime, contemporaries marveled at the artist’s great skill and wide-ranging pur...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short, personal reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, curator Casey Lee reminisces on learning to crochet and sew as she considers a 17th century drawing by Gerard ter Borch of a young girl making lace. To learn more about this work, visit: www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/285052/. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every other Tu...

“We’re proud that Los Angeles, which is a city that’s sometimes derided as a city that doesn’t care about its history or doesn’t care about historic preservation, we think we’re finally exploding that myth once and for all.” In 1962 Los Angeles passed one of the first and most forward-thinking historic preservation ordinances in the United States, which called for a complete survey of the city to identify cultural monuments. Nearly 40 years later, however, the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI)...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short, personal reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, educator Elmira Adamian wonders about a couple in an ancient fresco as she shelters at home with her family. To learn more about this work, visit: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/6535/. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every other Tuesday. Transcript JAMES CUNO: Hi...

"After you have the institutionalization of the discourse of nationalism, a Chinese bronze that is buried in the ground belongs to the ancient Chinese nation. So now anyone who removes this artifact is a thief." From the 1790s to the 1930s, archaeologists from Europe and North America removed tens of thousands of art objects, manuscripts, and antiquities from China and dispersed them among museums and university collections outside Asia. This removal of artifacts took place with the permission ...