Johnson Publishing Company Archive, New Scholars Program Theme

Barbara T. Smith: The Way to Be

February 28–July 16, 2023 | Getty Center

Imagine getting lost among light-up musical blades of grass, feeling small as an ant. Only fragments of Barbara T. Smith’s giant environmental sculpture Field Piece remain, but in this short video she describes what it felt like to experience the installation back in 1972. You can also watch more archival clips from Smith’s performances, including Field Piece, on our YouTube playlist.
 

Watch more archival footage

Explore the exhibition

PST Art: Art and Science Collide

Fall 2024
 

Katherine E. Fleming, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, recently joined more than 50 partner organizations to announce the mind-expanding exhibitions they will present in the next Pacific Standard Time, Art & Science Collide, which opens in September 2024. Here at the GRI, a new exhibition will document Experiments in Art and Technology, the organization founded in 1966 that produced transformative collaborations between engineers and New York City’s avant-garde artists.

Find out who’s participating and what the exhibitions will explore

Annual Theme: Extinction

The arts have the capacity to mitigate against cultural loss by visualizing, capturing, and interpreting aspects of the fleeting, the ephemeral, and the unrecoverable. In this moment of extreme environmental decay and monumental epidemic loss, the Getty Scholars Program invites applications on the pressing topic of extinction and its bearing on the visual arts and cultural heritage.

Applications open on July 1, 2023. The deadline for all applications for the 2024–2025 academic year is October 2, 2023.

Learn more and how to apply

AAAHI Fellowships

The African American Art History Initiative (AAAHI) will support two fellows to generate new knowledge in the expanding field of African American art history. We invite applications from scholars who focus on African American art and visual culture in all time periods and media and in a broad range of theoretical and methodological traditions.

Applications open on July 1, 2023. The deadline for all applications for the 2024–2025 academic year is October 2, 2023.

Learn more and how to apply

Sam Francis papers, 1916–2010 (bulk 1950–1994)

This month we celebrate the centennial of Abstract Expressionist painter Sam Francis  (1923–1994), whose archive is held at Getty. Francis was a second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter who incorporated influences of Jungian psychology, Buddhism, and Japanese aesthetics into the urban and angst-ridden painting style of the New York School. The papers document his exhibitions, business ventures, friendships, five marriages, and childhood.

Browse the finding aid

Xerox Art Making Workshop

Saturday, June 10, 2023, 12:00–4:00 p.m.

Getty Center, Ada Louise Huxtable Lecture Hall

Create your own Xerox art! Learn how to use copy machines, collage, and color to express yourself. Led by artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed, this free drop-in workshop is inspired by the Getty Research Institute’s exhibition Barbara T. Smith: the Way to Be.

Get free tickets

Opening a Treasure Trove of Black History to the World

The archive of the Johnson Publishing Company, which produced iconic magazines like Ebony and Jet, is one of the most significant collections of 20th century Black American history and culture. Last year, ownership of the archive was officially transferred to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and Getty. This fall, the two institutions begin the monumental task of cataloging and digitizing the entire archive, making it accessible online, and moving the materials to their new home in Washington, DC.

Inside the plan to digitize the archive

OK Computer

Why would an art historian need to learn how to code? For Bárbara Romero Ferrón, a Getty graduate intern, big data provides a new way of understanding 19th-century art history. Instead of analyzing images one by one, she explains, art historians can study and compare them in much vaster quantities with the help of computers.

It was exciting for Romero Ferrón to come to the GRI, which is known for its work in the digital humanities with projects like the Getty Vocabularies and the Getty Provenance Index, a vast database of archival sales catalogs, inventories, and stock books from the 16th century on.

The beauty of the big picture

Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archive

By Frances Terpak and Michelle Brunnick

With essays by Patti Smith and Jonathan Weinberg

In honor of Pride month, learn more about how photographer Robert Mapplethorpe challenged the limits of censorship and conformity. His artistic vision helped shape the social and cultural fabric of the 1970s and 80s and, following his death in 1989 from AIDS, informed the political landscape of the 1990s. Decades later, his provocative photographs continue to resonate with audiences all over the world.

Buy Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archive

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

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