Happy Birthday, Barbara!

Barbara T. Smith: The Way to Be

February 28–July 16, 2023 | Getty Center

On the occasion of her autobiographical exhibition, artist Barbara T. Smith shares her favorite tunes—from Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock” to the Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes.” As Smith tells us, “Music has played an important role in my artworks.”

Listen to the playlist

Explore the exhibition

Meet the Scholars Studying Art & Technology

We welcome our incoming cohort of scholars, who will be conducting research on the theme Art & Technology during the 2023/2024 academic year. Throughout human history, artists have embraced technological innovations—from the casting of ancient bronzes to the printing of three-dimensional objects—and harnessed the new possibilities afforded by them. With this year’s theme, these scholars embrace questions on manufacture and craft, process and invention, materiality and immateriality, and the digital and the virtual.

Applications for the 2024/2025 scholar year are now open, and the deadline to apply is October 2, 2023.

Meet the new scholars

Learn more about the Scholars Program

Getty Launches Art and Poetry Podcast

A new podcast miniseries hosted by LeRonn Brooks, associate curator at the Getty Research Institute, celebrates the influence of Black culture on visual art and poetry. The three part series features Brooks in conversation with poet, playright, essayist, and professor Claudia Rankine, poet and director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) Kevin Young, and poet and painter Terrance Hayes.

Listen to the episodes

Getty Research Journal Converting to Open Access

Getty is pleased to announce that the Getty Research Journal, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal on the visual arts, will be converted to a diamond open-access publication, with no cost to authors or readers, beginning with the spring 2024 issue.

Learn more

Collaborative ART Archive

The Getty Library is now among 40 art libraries working together to safeguard the kind of ephemeral digital art materials that might otherwise be lost to history. The Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA) has preserved 800 web-based materials to date, from art criticism to artist websites, to ensure the art historical record of the 21st century is accessible far into the future.

Explore the project

Maps of Paris, 1754–1907

The 152 maps of Paris and environs in this collection date from the mid-eighteenth to the early-twentieth centuries, covering the period during which Paris was transformed from a largely medieval city into a modern metropolis under Napoléon Bonaparte and Napoléon III. The maps document the division of the city, first into twelve arrondissements, and later as it grew into twenty arrondissements, and traces the development of its infrastructure through the building of its rail system and train stations.
 

Browse the finding aid

Happy Birthday, Barbara!

Saturday, July 8, 2023, 4:00–5:00 p.m.

Harold M. Williams Auditorium

Join the party to celebrate Barbara T. Smith’s 92nd birthday! Artists and friends will honor Smith with stories, films, and memories to accompany their experiences shared in Smith’s autobiography The Way to Be: A Memoir (2023). The program will be followed by a reception with cake and champagne from 5 pm to 6 pm.

Get free tickets

But First, Sketch

Leonardo da Vinci was known to pull a sketchbook from his pocket and set down ideas in quick drawings. Artists since him have also loved sketchbooks—for seizing a sudden burst of inspiration, recording what they see, or trying out different designs. Relatively few artists’ sketchbooks have remained intact, though—many were disbound, their pages cut loose and scattered far and wide. But Getty has a growing collection, and its sketches by Degas, Rothko, and others might inspire you to jot down whatever catches your attention this summer.

An artist’s version of a diary

Explore the sketchbooks research guide

How to Rescue Wet Collections?

What’s the game plan if water ever comes into contact with rare books and other printed material? Last fall, the GRI hosted the Wet Collections Salvage Workshop, in which librarians, conservators, and curators gathered to learn practical methods for triaging and drying different types of material. The workshop was an important exercise in “trying to understand what the risks are, how to mitigate them, and how to be prepared to respond to emergencies,” said Rachel Rivenc, head of conservation and preservation.

Read on

Hersilia’s Sisters: Jacques-Louis David, Women, and the Emergence of Civil Society in Post-Revolution France

By Norman Bryson

In 1799, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) exhibited his Intervention of the Sabines, a history painting featuring the ancient heroine Hersilia, he added portraits of two contemporary women on either side of her—Henriette de Verninac, daughter of Charles-François Delacroix, minister of foreign affairs, and Juliette Récamier, a well-known and admired socialite. Drawing on many disciplines, Norman Bryson explains how such a combination of paintings could reveal the underlying nature of the Directoire, the period between the vicious and near-dictatorial Reign of Terror (1793–94) and the coup in 1799 that brought Napoleon to power.

Buy Hersilia’s Sisters

Xerox Art

This artwork was made by filmmaker and artist Jonathan Skurnik, who attended our recent Xerox art making workshop. “Barbara Smith’s pioneering use of the Xerox machine as a tool to create art inspired me to play with ideas of repetition and transformation,” says Skurnik, “I then brought home my sheets and used my scanner and Adobe Premiere to make rudimentary animations that I hope would make Smith proud.”

Learn more about Skurnik’s films and art

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for the sake of dancing in the street

June 3–July 29, 2023

OXY ARTS
 

for the sake of dancing in the street, organized by OXY ARTS, LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) and Yasmine Nasser Diaz, is a group exhibition celebrating the interconnectedness of feminist and queer resistance. Collectively the work documents and amplifies individual acts of resistance, as well as historical and ongoing global feminist protest movements, to create joyful new reverberating calls to action.
 

Learn more

All Library users must comply with the Library’s Policies for Readers and First-Time Visitors before and during their visit. Contact Library Reference to make an appointment or ask questions.