With an Additional $12 M., Getty Foundation Announces Science-Focused 2024 PST Shows

The Getty Foundation has provided a fuller picture of the exhibition slate that will dominate Southern California museums during fall 2024, when many will take part in the ambitious Pacific Standard Time initiative, now titled “Art & Science Collide.”

Through the initiative’s launch, the foundation said it will commit at least $17 million toward the research and realization of the PST exhibitions, an increase of $12 million from when it first announced $5 million toward research grants in early 2021.

“What it all adds up to is that it’s a really capacious topic and expansive in definition,” Joan Weinstein, director of the Getty Foundation, who has overseen all iterations of PST, told ARTnews in an interview. “As a community, you can tell the complexity of the story in a way that no individual museum could, particularly with a large topic.”

She continued, “Together, these exhibitions have the potential to fundamentally redefine the relationship between art and science for the 21st century, demonstrating how art and science working together can offer both real solutions to real problems, but also speculative possibilities for change to shift our thinking in new ways which allow us to tackle some of these really intractable problems.”

Additionally, the Getty announced that it would now make PST a quinquennial event, occurring once every five years, and that it will operate under the new name of PST Art moving forward. (The most recent edition, 2017’s PST: LA/LA, will have occurred seven years earlier by the time “Art & Science Collide” opens.)

“The success of the first two—the impact that they had—just made it seem that we should commit to this for the long haul,” Weinstein said. “It allows it to be on the calendar, something that you want to make sure you come to every five years because you know it’s going to be something new and interesting and groundbreaking. It also puts all of the arts institutions in Southern California, large and small on a national and international stage—and they deserve it.”

Eight themes have emerged across the more than 60 exhibitions that will be presented. They are “Ecology and Environmental Justice,” “Visions of the Future,” “Technologies of Seeing and Control,” “The Skies and the Cosmos,” “The Body: Site, Image, Possibility,” “Picturing Science,” “Global Cultures,” and “Claiming Tomorrow.”

For example, “Ecology and Environmental Justice” will include exhibitions like the Hammer Museum’s “Breath(e): Towards Climate and Social Justice,” which “considers the connections between climate change, environmental justice, and social justice through the lens of contemporary art,” according to a release. It will feature around 35 artworks, with at least six of which will be new commissions, ranging from a bee sculpture by Garnett Puett and a living garden by Ron Finley.

Similarly, at the Luckman Gallery at Cal State LA, Self Help Graphics & Art will present work by LA-based artists Maru García and Beatriz Jaramillo, who have been working on a long-term soil remediation project with the Natural History Museum at two sites—an Exide battery plant in Vernon, close to Self Help’s Boyle Heights locations, and the former Athens Tank Farm (Exxon Mobil) site in Willowbrook.

Other threads woven throughout include exhibitions focusing on Indigenous knowledge and technologies, which “we now see how important that is, particularly around issues of sustainability and climate crisis,” Weinstein said. One such exhibition is the “Indigenous Futures, or How to Survive and Thrive After the Apocalypse” at the Autry Museum of the American West.

Cannupa Hanska Luger, whose work will be featured in both the “Indigenous Futures” and “Breath(e)” exhibitions, said in a statement, “From my Indigenous perspective, we’re three to four generations into an apocalypse and trying to navigate through darkness toward a future where we can thrive. I think of the artwork I’m showing in Art & Science Collide as a kind of technology that values reverence for the land we belong to, rather than privileging extraction from a land that we mistakenly believe belongs to us.”

Under the banner of “Picturing Science,” visitors will learn “how art operates in a different realm, in the scientific realm,” Weinstein said, and “what the role of visualization is in conveying scientific information.”

Some of those shows include “Crossing Over: Caltech and Visual Culture, 1920–2020” at the California Institute of Technology or “Habitats: Rethinking a Century of Dioramas” at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which involved artists in their creations in “constructing a narrative around dominating certain environments, often a colonialist one,” Weinstein said. “Being able to take a look at that and the role that artists and visual materials played in that is a really interesting idea.”

There have also been updates to the line-up when comparing the 2021 grants and the current slate of exhibitions. Organizations now joining PST include the Griffith Observatory, for a show titled “Pacific Standard Universe”; LAXART, for an exhibition titled “Life on Earth: Art and Ecofeminism”; the Museum of Latin American Art, which will look at an under-known art movement from Latin America from the 1960s and ’70s called ARTEONICA; and an exhibition jointly organized by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Glendale Library’s Arts & Culture division. Others include OXY ARTS, the Palm Springs Art Museum, and Santa Barbara City College’s Atkinson Gallery.

Similarly, the Oceanside Museum of Art, also a new participant in PST, is now the main organizer for an exhibition focused on artists responding to the health of the Pacific Ocean, now titled “Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean.” The Orange County Museum of Art was originally the lead organization for the show and will now be an additional venue.

The Getty’s exhibition spaces, which do not receive funding from the foundation for their research, will also now present eight exhibitions, instead of the previously announced two, including “Experiments in Art and Technology,” “Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography,” “Drawing with Light,” and “Ultra-Violet: New Light on Van Gogh’s Irises.”

Several institutions also appear to no longer be participating: the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the Laguna Art Museum, the Mistake Room, the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which has pushed its opening back until 2025.

And the Huntington and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are also now each mounting one fewer exhibition, with “Seeing for Yourself: The Art and Science of Visualizing Hidden Worlds” and “Better Living through Science: The Home of the Future, 1920–1984,” respectively, no longer being listed as part of the programming.  

The previous editions of PST have been acclaimed for their role in rewriting art history, with the first, in 2012, staking a claim for the importance of art made in Southern California during the postwar era. The most recent, from 2017, showed how Latin American and Latinx art have had an indelible impact on the region’s artistic landscape.

Weinstein said she expects that “Art & Science Collide” will have a slightly different impact: “It’s not so much what’s left out of art history, as how can we rethink some of the things we think we know.”

The full list of Getty Foundation–funded exhibitions follows below.

Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
“Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema”
“Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures”

Armory Center for the Arts
“From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments”

ArtCenter College of Design
“Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art”

Autry Museum of the American West
“Indigenous Futures, or How to Survive and Thrive After the Apocalypse”
“Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West”

Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College
“Fred Eversley”

The Broad
“Social Forest: Oaks of Tovaangar”

California African American Museum
“World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project”

California Institute of Technology
“Crossing Over: Caltech and Visual Culture, 1920–2020”

Center for Land Use Interpretation
“Remote Sensing: Explorations into the Art of Detection”

Craft Contemporary
“Nature Near: Material Experimentation in Architecture and Design”

CSUDH University Art Gallery
“Brackish Water Los Angeles”

Fathomers
presented at Japanese American Cultural & Community Center
“Emergence: A Genealogy”

Fulcrum Arts
presented at the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University
“Energy Fields: Vibrations of The Pacific”

Griffith Observatory
“Pacific Standard Universe”

Hammer Museum
“Breath(e): Towards Climate and Social Justice”

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
“Storm Cloud: Art, Science, Nature, and the Industrial Age”
“奪天工 Growing and Knowing in the Gardens of China”

Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
“Scientia Sexualis”

LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions)
“(un)disciplinary tactics: Beatriz da Costa”

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
“Cosmologies”
“We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art”
“Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film”

LA Filmforum
“All Kinds of Experiments”

La Jolla Historical Society
with additional venues at California Center for the Arts, San Diego Central Library, and the Mandeville Gallery at UCSD
“Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work”

LAXART
“Life on Earth: Art and Ecofeminism”

Library Foundation of Los Angeles and LA Public Library
“No Prior Art”

Mingei International Museum
“Blue Gold: The Art and Science of Indigo”

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)
“Olafur Eliasson”

MOLAA (Museum of Latin American Art)
“ARTEONICA: Art, Science, and Technology in Latin America Today”

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
“Medical Condition: Art, Sickness, and Survival”

Museum of Jurassic Technology
“A Veiled Gazelle: Intimations of the Infinite and Eternal—Islamic Geometries of Medieval Al-Andalus”

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Glendale Library, Arts & Culture
presented at Brand Library & Art Center
“The Stars Are Calling: Objects of Connectedness and Interplanetary Discovery”

Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County
“Habitats: Rethinking a Century of Dioramas”
“Excavations”

Oceanside Museum of Art
with additional venues at Orange County Museum of Art and Crystal Cove Conservancy
“Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean”

ONE Archives at the USC Libraries
presented at the USC Fisher Museum of Art
“Sexual Science and the Imagi-nation”

OXY ARTS
“Invisibility: Powers and Perils”

Palm Springs Art Museum
“Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945 to 1990”

REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater)
“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”

The San Diego Museum of Art
“Wonders of Creation: Art, Science, and Innovation in the Islamic World”

SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture)
“Views of Planet City”

Self Help Graphics & Art
presented at the Luckman Gallery at Cal State LA
“Sinks: Places We Call Home”

UCI Beall Center for Art + Technology
“Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Predictability”

UCLA Art | Sci Center
“Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption”

UCLA Arts Conditional Studio
presented at Human Resources
“Art and the Internet in LA”

UCLA Film & Television Archive
in partnership with UCLA Cinema & Media Studies Program
“Science Fiction Against the Margins”

UCR ARTS at the University of California Riverside
“Digital Capture: Southern California and the Origins of the Pixel-Based Image World”

UC San Diego Visual Arts
in partnership with Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography
“Embodied Pacific”

Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College
“We Place Life at the Center”

The Wende Museum
“Surveillance and Countersurveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency”

Exhibitions included in “Art & Science Collide,” but not supported by Getty Foundation research grants:

Getty
“Experiments in Art and Technology”
“Lumen: The Art & Science of Light”
“Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography”
“Ultra-Violet: New Light on Van Gogh’s Irises”
“Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography”
“Rising Signs: The Medieval Science of Astrology”
“Magnified Wonders: An 18th-Century Microscope”
“Drawing with Light”
“Alta / a Human Atlas of Los Angeles”

MOAH (Lancaster Museum of Art and History)
“Desert Forest: Human Impact on Joshua Trees and Their Habitat”

Skirball Cultural Center
“Trees, Time, and Technology: Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology”