Episodes

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 Kelly Jane Smith-Fatten learns about Michelangelo by drawing from his drawings. To learn more about this work, visit: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/298166/. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every other Tuesday. Transcript JAMES CUNO: Hi, I’m Jim Cuno, pr...

"The Arensbergs’ staging of the art in their collection, it’s both playful, but like chess, it is really serious business." The 1913 Armory Show of avant-garde European art sparked a life-changing fascination with collecting in Louise and Walter Arensberg. The couple quickly became influential participants in New York’s bohemian art scene. In 1921 the Arensbergs moved to Los Angeles, where they spent the next few decades building a vast and idiosyncratic art collection in their Mediterranean Re...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, educator Alice Doo remembers her own California childhood and reflects on the relationship among art, change, and American history through a Dorothea Lange photograph. To learn more about this work, visit: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/128393/. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordin...

“It’s really quite astonishing how often, in looking at some of the works of these Japanese American photographers, how simple the subject is, and yet how graceful its rendition is.” At the turn of the 20th century, the Japanese population in Los Angeles was growing rapidly. At the same time, photography was becoming more affordable, accessible, and popular. Scores of Japanese Americans were avid photographers in this period, and by 1926 the community was active enough in LA to form a club, the...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, curator Nicole Budrovich reflects on debate and discourse through an ancient plate. To learn more about this work, visit: www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/10598/. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every other Tuesday. Transcript JAMES CUNO: Hi, I’m Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul G...

“For most of his life, Paul Williams lived in two worlds: one as an architect and one as an African American man in his community.” When African American architect Paul Revere Williams was born in Los Angeles in 1894, the city—like its Black population—was small but growing rapidly. This expansion provided many opportunities for architects to design homes, offices, stores, and even communities. Williams thrived in this landscape, working on everything from elaborate homes for Hollywood stars li...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, curator Davide Gasparotto reminisces on his days as a student through Vilelm Hammershøi's Interior with an Easel, Bredgade 25. To learn more about this work, visit: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/332549/. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every other Tuesday. Transcript JAME...

"The idea of a kind of intact tomb, at a certain moment where the archaeologist breaks through the door and lifts up a lamp to reveal the glint of gold everywhere. That’s become the defining moment for archaeology." What do we know about the people who explored and studied Egypt’s ancient civilizations? The notebooks of well-known figures such as Howard Carter, who unearthed King Tut’s tomb in 1919 and created stunning, detailed renderings of it, reveal how Europeans have tried for centuries to...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, Erin Fussell longs to “cut a rug” again as she looks at photographs from the 1978 “Dyke of Your Dreams” dance at the Women’s Building. To learn more about this event, visit: http://hdl.handle.net/10020/2017m43_6d9d703f54c264dc247ef2511a82bd4d. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every other T...

“The reliefs show people being impaled on spikes and the enemy being decapitated and sometimes flayed alive. I mean it’s absolutely brutal, and it was intended to intimidate.” With a powerful empire centered on the Tigris River—today in northern Iraq—the Assyrians were one of the great and formative cultures of the ancient world. They used their military might to conquer and control an extensive territory, which at its peak in the seventh century BCE reached from Syria in the West into Turkey a...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, Amanda Berman considers how studying a set of eighteenth-century French porcelain sculptures reveals hidden racism and what that might mean for us today. To learn more about this artwork, visit: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/5617. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every other...

“The fifteen years of civil war did not produce as much damage as the few seconds did on August 4th.” On the evening of August 4, 2020, Beirut—the capital of Lebanon and one of the oldest cities in the world—experienced a devastating explosion, when more than two and a half tons of ammonium nitrate detonated at its port on the Mediterranean Sea. The explosion was felt across the region, killing nearly two hundred and injuring and displacing thousands more, many of whom were already struggling t...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, educator Anna Sapenuk finds parallels in Herakles and Iolaos’s fight against the Hydra and our global battle against the coronavirus. To learn more about this artwork, visit: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/10600/. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every other Tuesday. JAMES C...

"I think we can all empathize with someone who’s like a son, or in this case, an adopted son, trying to kind of make his own mark and escape the shadow of his father, and leave something on the world of his own." In the year 79 CE, Pliny the Elder set out to investigate a large cloud of ash rising in the sky above the Bay of Naples. It was the eruption of Vesuvius, and Pliny did not survive. A trailblazing naturalist, he is best remembered today for his multivolume encyclopedia Natural History,...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, Carolyn Peter considers how gardening is like early photography—and how both involve a little bit of wonder. To learn more about this artwork, visit: www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/64876/. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every other Tuesday. Transcript JAMES CUNO: Hi, I’m Jim Cuno...

"You have all these incredibly powerful people across Italy, all writing to Michelangelo and saying, 'Please, please, pretty please, can I have one of your drawings?' And, you know, Michelangelo never obliged them." Michelangelo is among the most influential and impressive artists of the Italian High Renaissance. His lifelike sculptures and powerful paintings are some of the most recognizable works in Western art history. He also drew prolifically, making sketch after sketch of figures in sligh...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, Aleia McDaniel discusses her long-held love for cursive and how it relates to an illuminated manuscript from 1180. To learn more about this artwork, visit: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/103710/. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every other Tuesday. Transcript JAMES CUNO: H...

When Brigitte Benkemoun bought a leather diary case from eBay, she did not expect to find a small address book tucked into the back. And she certainly didn’t expect that book to contain the names of some of the most renowned figures of 20th century Paris—names like André Breton, Brassaï, Jean Cocteau, and Jacques Lacan. She began researching these contacts until she uncovered the identity of the address book’s former owner: the surrealist artist Dora Maar. In this episode, Benkemoun discusses t...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, Johnny Tran relates deeply to the joy of a family gathered around the dinner table and considers the importance of beautiful public housing to Black Angelenos in the 1940s. He discusses a photograph of architect Paul R. Williams’s Pueblo del Rio project from Leonard Nadel’s unpublished book Pueblo Del Rio:...

Art institutions around the world responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by closing their doors and rethinking planned exhibitions, programming, and partnerships. Now, a few months into the crisis, museums are beginning to reopen, but they are also reevaluating what the next few years might bring and how they might continue to work collaboratively. The pandemic hit just as the Getty was beginning to partner with museums in Mumbai, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Berlin on its Ancient Worlds Now initiati...

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, curator Larisa Grollemond thinks about how calendars link us to the middle ages. To learn more about this artwork, visit: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/3500/. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every other Tuesday. Transcript JAMES CUNO: Hi, I’m Jim Cuno, president of the J....

Art institutions around the world responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by closing their doors and rethinking planned exhibitions, programming, and partnerships. Now, a few months into the crisis, museums are beginning to reopen, but they are also reevaluating what the next few years might bring and how they might continue to work collaboratively. The pandemic hit just as Getty was beginning to partner with museums in Mumbai, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Berlin on its Ancient Worlds Now initiative, ...

We’ve asked curators from the Getty Museum and Getty Research Institute to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, curator Idurre Alonso imagines a trip to the lush Brazilian landscape through an illustration in a 1648 book. To learn more about this artwork, visit: http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cat_ALMA2113047222000155. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every Tuesday. JAMES C...

We’ve asked curators from the Getty Museum and Getty Research Institute to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, curator Kenneth Lapatin dives into a new world through a Roman carved gem that features Aeneas fleeing Troy. To learn more about this artwork, visit: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/336770/. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every Tuesday. _____ J...