Getty Museum continues its inspiring digital series that you can access while you’re right here in New Zealand. Take a look at their latest offerings:
Getty Research Institute’s newest artist in residence
Artist Gala Porras-Kim is a ‘therapist’ for the museum. She excavates an institution's repressed past and sheds light on the long-forgotten storage rooms, torn textiles, and fragments that might otherwise be uncategorizable.
For the next two years she will join a cohort of scholars in developing work around the theme of the fragment. She hopes to conduct research in the special collections to understand how the fragments of objects are collected, catalogued, stored, displayed, and conserved, even as much about them is still unknown.
Go inside the Fez
The Fez was the first full-scale Arab nightclub in Los Angeles. Its downstairs Magic Carpet Room restaurant served Lebanese classics, and its cavernous upstairs Sinbad Room featured the city's top belly dancers, oud players, and darbuka drummers. The club was a Hollywood favourite for the likes of Kim Novak, Marlon Brando, Jayne Mansfield, and Syrian-American actor Danny Thomas. The local Arab community, meanwhile, came for Saadoun Al-Bayati and other Middle Eastern musicians.
Explore Degas’ Waiting virtually
Waiting includes the depiction of a dancer. Engaged in her own thoughts, we see her off-stage in a relatively private space. Degas has deconstructed the guise of the effortless grace and beauty of ballerinas and replaced it with the reality of toil and fatigue.
Podcast: The Compensations of Plunder
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 and cooperation of local officials, but growing nationalism following the 1911 Revolution led Chinese scholars to view this activity as theft. According to historian Justin Jacobs, however, retroactively labeling it as "plunder" tells only part of a complicated, nuanced story.