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:
Visit the UNESCO heritage site of Palmyra, Syria, through a new online exhibition
Return to Palmyra is a website presented both in Arabic and English that invites you to explore the ancient city. Waleed Khaled al-As'ad, director emeritus of antiquities and museums at Palmyra, shares his experiences growing up among the historic ruins; archaeologist Joan Aruz writes about the city's fascinating history; and you can view more than 100 rare images, many of famous sites that no longer exist.
Photographing the traces of COVID-19
Camilo José Vergara has long photographed humble streets and buildings in New York, New Jersey, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Before the pandemic, he returned to the same spots day after day, documenting how cities change as the years pass and new immigrants arrive and add their marks. Lately Vergara has been photographing the pandemic's impact on New York and New Jersey, specifically the places he can reach via public transportation.
A historic Black rights protest
In the summer of 1850, a small town near Syracuse, New York, hosted an important gathering that was captured in a rare photograph. The event was to rally opposition to a proposed law that would allow marshals to arrest anyone suspected of having escaped enslavement. The photograph is now the subject of an online exhibition on Google Arts & Culture.
The life and career of the influential African American artist Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden became a deeply influential artist over the course of a long career that spanned a tumultuous period in the fight for representation and civil rights for African Americans. Art historian Mary Schmidt Campbell delves into Bearden's fascinating life and discusses her recent book about him.
Campbell joined the J. Paul Getty Trust Board of Trustees in 2019. She is president of Spelman College, dean emerita of the Tisch School of the Arts, and served as the vice chair of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities under former president Barack Obama.
The Black women activists behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott
The popular narrative of the Montgomery Bus Boycott is well known: Rosa Parks's arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a White passenger on a segregated Montgomery bus, the ensuing year-long boycott led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the NAACP lawsuit that led the Supreme Court to deem segregation on Montgomery buses unconstitutional. But that narrative largely omits the Black women who initiated and organized the boycott, and artist Lava Thomas is honouring those unsung heroes through a new project.