Getty Visit

Every year the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities has a luncheon at the Getty jointly with the Getty Research Institute and the LAIH fellows get to hang out with the Getty Scholars and people on the Getty Visiting Scholars program (Alexa Sekyra, the head of the program, was at the luncheon today, so I got to meet her). The talk is usually given by a curator of an exhibition or program that’s either current, or coming up. The first time I went, a few years ago, it was the Spring before the launch of the Pacific Standard Time region-wide celebration of 35 years of Southern California art and art movements (’45-’80) that broke away from letting New York and Western Europe call the tunes and began to define some of the distinctive voices of their own that are now so well known world wide… then we had a talk from a group of curators about the multi-museum collaboration to make that happen. One of the things I learned today from Andrew Perchuck, the Deputy Director of the Getty Research Institute who welcomed us all in a short address, was that there will be a new Pacific Standard Time event coming up in 2018, so stay tuned. This time it will have more of a focus on Latino and Latin American art. See here.

Today we had Nancy Perloff tell us about the current exhibit (for which she is curator), World War I: War of Images, Images of War. See more here. It was a fantastic talk! She described the various types of art depicting war (whether it be for propaganda purposes, critique, recruiting, etc.) during the World War I period in various countries, illustrating it with examples form the exhibition (see lots in the link I gave you above). As usual, we had an engaging question and answer session afterwards.

Afterwards, Fellows melted into the general population of visitors at the Getty, most likely to see the WWI exhibition or the massive Turner exhibition that also happens to be on – or both. Turner!

-cvj