Getty continues its online-accessible series of exhibits and art exploration. Explore the range of online events, podcasts, and articles below.
Why are so many ancient statues naked?
We hope you got a chance to watch the first episode of the new series Becoming Artsy, Getty’s new YouTube show. The second episode drops soon; but in the meantime, check out this Becoming Artsy extra. Host Jessie Hendricks finds out why so many statues in the Getty Villa gardens—especially the male figures—were created sans clothes.
The theft and unlikely recovery of Willem de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre
In 1985 two thieves casually entered the University of Arizona Museum of Art (UAMA). They strolled out minutes later with Willem de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre. Without security cameras or solid leads, the trail to the stolen painting quickly went cold. But in 2017 the work turned up in an unlikely place: a small antique shop in Silver City, New Mexico. Hear the amazing tale of Woman-Ochre’s theft, recovery, and conservation.
Listen to the podcast
Nudity and the Ancient Greeks
Visitors, especially school-aged children, are often struck by the nude statues at the Getty Villa Museum. You may have noticed kids giggling with their friends as they pass by a naked Venus or Hercules. Were other ancient cultures as devoted to depicting the nude body or was it just the Greeks? And what did these idealized nudes signify?
Judy Baca Retrospective
Judy Baca’s powerful murals are a highlight of driving along the streets of Los Angeles. The internationally renowned Chicana muralist, public intellectual, and community activist is celebrated in this comprehensive retrospective at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach. The exhibition explores the feminist currents in her work, her founding of the Social and Public Arts Resource Center in 1976, and then examines her most famous work, the Great Wall of Los Angeles mural in the San Fernando Valley. A selection of Baca’s work will be on view at the Getty Center Museum in summer 2022.
Paolo Veneziano: Art & Devotion in 14th-Century Venice
Davide Gasparatto, Italian renaissance expert and head of the Museum’s paintings department, curated a focused exhibition on Paolo Veneziano who led the premier painter’s workshop in late medieval Venice. In this short video, Davide delves into Veneziano’s glittering altar pieces, studded with precious jewels and pearls, and discusses their patrons, process of creation, devotional use, and symbolism.
Feeling the Flowers
Van Gogh’s vibrant painting Irises is one of our most beloved works of art and therefore, always on view. But this past year when the Museum was closed, our conservators had the rare opportunity to bring the painting downstairs to the lab for closer exploration. They were able to examine the artwork with the latest technology, which will soon reveal new insights about Van Gogh’s process and techniques.
Read the story >
Irises are a symbolic flower, referring to the Greek goddess of the rainbow, and to signs of spring. This online exhibit looks at several artworks in our collection, from illuminated manuscripts to photography, which feature this stately blossom.
Who’s Behind the Camera?
In the exhibition Photo Flux: Unshuttering LA (on view through October 10th at the Getty Center), 35 artists with ties to LA — primarily artists of color—shake up the field, highlighting their personal narratives, aesthetics, and identities. Accompanying their striking photographs is a selection of work by participants in Getty’s Unshuttered program, which gives young artists tools to express their ideas and beliefs through photography.
In a recent episode of our podcast Art + Ideas, jill moniz, curator of Photo Flux, delves into the meaning and power of works in the exhibition by Todd Gray, Laura Aguilar, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others. Then, our head of education Keishia Gu discusses the evolution of Unshuttered and its multiple efforts to empower youth through photography, especially during the past year of upheaval.
Introducing Becoming Artsy
Take a dynamic ride through Getty’s collections, laboratories, gardens, and more with Becoming Artsy, our new YouTube series. Host Jessie Hendricks, a self-described "sciencey, math kind of person," brings viewers along as she gets to know a world she’s always wanted to explore: art. In this first episode, Hendricks visits antiquities curator Kenneth Lapatin at the Getty Villa and learns some fascinating facts even the artsiest people may not know.
Watch Becoming Artsy, Episode 1
When bicycles and kitchen stools became art
In 1913 Dada artist Marcel Duchamp affixed a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watched it turn. The piece became his first “readymade” work of art. With readymades, Duchamp thought, artists could display everyday objects as art and encourage audiences to consider them in a fresh way. Now, we want to see your readymade! Make your own, give it a title, and post a photo on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook with the hashtag #GettyReadymade.
Join in!
Welcome to Fantastic Journeys: Myth, Magic, and Mysterious Monsters
Get cozy this fall with our new video series for kids and families. Stories feature daring adventures, fantastical beasts, and magical enchantments, and are performed by storytellers, puppets, artists, and animators. After each Journey, enjoy imagination-sparking workshops guided by our Fantastic Journeys artists while exploring artworks from the Getty collection.
Set sail on your first adventure
The power of telling your own story
On the occasion of the exhibition Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures, Getty curators and their colleagues at Art + Practice, the South LA nonprofit hosting the show, talk about Getty’s African American Art History Initiative, the exhibition, choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings, and why it's so important to tell one's own story.
How Blondell Cummings created an iconic dance inspired by childhood memories
Chicken Soup is Blondell Cummings’s most well-known work of art. First performed in 1981, the postmodern solo dance performance was based on Cummings’s childhood memories of being in the kitchen with her grandmothers. Cummings dances with a cast-iron skillet, scrubs the floors, sits in a kitchen chair, and reads a recipe out loud, reenacting her memories with eye-catching, abstract choreography.
Read on and watch Blondell Cummings perform Chicken Soup
Visiting the "den mother" of Fluxus art
Marcia Reed, curator of the exhibition Fluxus Means Change: Jean Brown's Avant-Garde Archive, shares what it was like to meet collector Jean Brown at her Massachusetts home, a 19th-century Shaker seed house once a favorite destination for Claes Oldenburg, Marcel Duchamp, and other mid-20th-century artists. "It was a truly magical, inspired place inhabited with spirit like I have experienced only a few times before, in artists' spaces or in nature," says Reed.
The dancer who turned everyday life into art
If your everyday activities like sweeping the floor, rocking your baby, or making dinner were transformed into dance movements, what might they look like? Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings explored this very question, finding poetry and beauty in the universal rhythms of life and translating them into mesmerizing works of art. A new exhibition focuses on Cummings and her unique approach to dance.
Inside an art movement that resists categorization
Art from three major 20-century movements is on view as part of Fluxus Means Change: Jean Brown’s Avant-Garde Archive at the Getty Research Institute: Dada, Surrealism, and Fluxus. Most people have some idea what the first two movements are about; but Fluxus is more flummoxing. What inspired it? Was Fluxus just an American thing? What do Fluxus works look like?
A critic shares personal insights into an avant-garde art movement
In the early 1960s, artists from around the world practicing in wide-ranging disciplines—music, dance, visual art, poetry—coalesced in a movement called Fluxus. Fluxus grew out of the absurdity of Dada, Surrealism, and Futurism, drawing inspiration from influential artists like Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. In this episode, art critic and Fluxus expert Peter Frank discusses the movement’s history and impact and shares his experiences with it while growing up in New York City.