9 Shows to See During the Getty’s Science-Themed PST ART Festival
Experimentalism regularly reigns supreme in the latest edition of PST ART, a recurring, Getty Foundation–run initiative in which dozens of museums in Los Angeles and the surrounding region stay shows around a specific theme. Past editions devoted to Californian art history and Latin American art have lured new figures into the canon. Expect this year’s, about the intersection of art and science, to accomplish something similar.
The offerings, as usual, skew toward all things cutting-edge. Few of the shows mounted this time are focused on painting, the medium that continues to dominate in US museums. Instead, most are given over to sculpture, performance, and work that barely resembles conventional notions of art.
With more than 60 shows spread across several cities, PST ART presents a challenge to visitors. It is difficult to take them all in, since their openings are staggered. (The majority, however, open this week and next week.) And with their subjects ranging from disability to ecological replenishment, plenty of heady material is broached, making for much to digest.
To help navigate it at all, here are nine shows to see at the 2024 edition of PST ART.
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“Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
Image Credit: Courtesy the Beatriz da Costa Estate Not long after receiving brain surgery, in 2011, Beatriz da Costa produced the video Dying for the Other, in which she compared her own experiences with cancer with those of mice diagnosed with the illness. That work was emblematic of the ways da Costa, who died the year afterward, viewed herself as embodying the same politics facing the natural world. A scientific researcher in addition to an artist, da Costa will now receive posthumous recognition in the form of this survey, which will feature a restaged version of PigeonBlog, her 2006–8 piece in which she outfitted pigeons with devices that could measure the local air quality and then crunched the numbers about what these birds took in.
Through January 5, 2025
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“Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice” at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Image Credit: Photo Jean-Christophe Lett/Hammer Museum This show surveys how 25 artists have used their art to highlight our vulnerable ecology. While its artist list is bedecked with stars (photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier and painter Yoshitomo Nara among them), the focus here is on the unclassifiable and the bizarre. Witness the case of Garnett Puett, a beekeeper by training, who enlists these insects as collaborators for his works known as “apisculptures.” Visitors will be able to interact with those sculptures, along with a garden by Ron Finley and an installation made of debris by Yangkura.
September 14, 2024–January 5, 2025
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“Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism” at the Brick, Los Angeles
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist In 1990, artist Aviva Rahmani purchased a former dump in Vinalhaven, an island in the Gulf of Maine, and rehabilitated it to form a functioning, 2.5-acre ecosystem. As part of the project, Rahmani departed her New York loft and took up a more remote form of living in Vinalhaven—a gesture that she said was emblematic of the tough decisions that must be made as nature is roiled by climate change. Documentation related to that project, known as Ghost Nets, appears in this survey, which asserts that the work had a feminist underpinning. It appears here alongside works by Tabita Rezaire, Alicia Barney Caldas, Carolina Caycedo (the subject of a separate PST exhibition at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Monterey Park), and more.
September 15, 2024–December 21, 2024
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“World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project” at California African American Museum, Los Angeles
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery George Washington Carver’s ceaselessly curious spirit led him to bring into the world all sorts of innovations, from dye derived from peanuts to postage stamp glue made from sweet potatoes. Carver may be most fondly remembered for his 300 patents, but it turns out he was an artist, too. His still lifes take center stage in this exhibition, which pairs his art with ephemera associated with his various inventions. Also on view will be contemporary art responding to Carver’s life and work.
September 18, 2024–March 2, 2025
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“For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability” at Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
Image Credit: ©Joey Terrill/Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Among the most exciting offerings of this year’s PST ART is this survey of how artists contended with illness and disability, from the 1960s through the Covid pandemic. The 80 artists included take many different approaches to the subject: a Joey Terrill painting featured here offers a visually stunning meditation on living with HIV, while Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose’s rarely seen Video Coffin (1994), an installation featuring footage of the former inside a casket, sounds a more somber note.
September 19, 2024–February 2, 2024
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“ARTEONICA: Art, Science, and Technology in Latin America Today” at Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach
Waldemar Cordeiro believed that computers could enable artists to “synthesize the compiler’s calculations and logic with the global experimentation of art,” and so he created a movement devoted to that project during the 1970s: arteônica, its name a combination of the Portuguese words for “art” and “technology.” Many Latin Americans have taken up this Brazilian artist’s mantle in the intervening decades, and this show aims to take stock of the rich, if often under-recognized, tradition of computer art in the region. Included in the show is Cordeiro’s daughter, Analívia Cordeiro, whose dance pieces have involved the usage of computers to analyze her participants’ movements.
September 22, 2024–February 23, 2025
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“Scientia Sexualis” at Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles
Image Credit: ©2023 MOCA Tucson/Courtesy the artist and Paul Soto, Los Angeles/Photo Maya Hawk Unlike most museum shows, which are organized by art experts affiliated with institutions, this survey was put together by Jennifer Doyle and Jeanne Vaccaro, two scholars of queer studies who have occasionally addressed contemporary art. Fittingly, the show has a solid theoretical backbone: it focuses on how artists of the past few decades have interpreted medical spaces and the equipment held within, often subverting sexual norms in the process. Included in the show is Jes Fan, a young sculptor who, for the recent Whitney Biennial, debuted new 3D-printed works that reinterpreted CAT scans of his body.
October 5, 2024–March 2, 2025
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Social Forest: Oaks of Tovaangar at Elysian Park, Los Angeles
Image Credit: Elon Schoenholz Photography/Courtesy The Broad In 1982, Joseph Beuys 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, 1982), for which the German artist planted thousands of trees in Kassel, Germany. Now, in homage to that famed artwork, archaeologist Desireé Reneé Martinez and artist Lazaro Arvizu Jr. have worked in tandem with the Tongva people to plant 100 California oak trees in Elysian Park. Their project—which is not an artwork per se—borrows Beuys’s Conceptualist strategies and redirects them toward ecological renewal. Alongside the work, the Broad art museum, which partnered on Social Forest with the nonprofit North East Trees, will mount a grand Beuys survey.
November 16, 2024–April 6, 2025
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“Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art”
Image Credit: ©Barbara Nessim/Digital image courtesy the artist/Los Angeles County Museum of Art Not quite an art exhibition yet not quite a design show either, this cross-disciplinary survey sets out to explore how digital technologies have reshaped artists’ ability to portray reality since the 1980s. It’s a wide-ranging inquiry, and so the offerings are unusually expansive, with a clip from Jurassic Park placed within the same galleries as work by Petra Cortright, whose webcam-shot videos, often augmented with chintzy digital effects, made her a closely watched artist during the post-internet era. Then again, tools like Photoshop can be used to many different ends, from digital design to conceptual photography, and the show is meant to be open-ended as a means of reflecting that.
November 24, 2024–July 13, 2025
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