Six Lessons Learned from Our First Crowdsourcing Project in the Digital...
At the Getty Research Institute (GRI), we think a lot about how we can provide greater access to the growing corpus of digitized materials from our special collections. This means we think a lot about...
View Article20 Years at the Getty Center: A Getty Research Institute Perspective
Since the Getty Research Institute moved into our distinctive curved building overlooking the Pacific Ocean on the Getty Center campus twenty years ago, we have helped hundreds of thousands of people...
View ArticleUnfolding Narratives in the Pierre de Gigord Collection
Before coming across the Pierre de Gigord Collection, I had been thinking about photographic memory in a literal sense: how memories exist physically within the surface of the photographic medium, how...
View ArticleThe People Behind the Getty Research Portal
The Getty Research Portal is a free online search tool that aggregates records for digitized books and journals related to art history, which are contributed from libraries around the world, and makes...
View ArticleThe Never-Ending History of Artists and Books
When I came to the Getty in 1983 and we began to build the collections—beginning with a small curatorial library and three rare books—even collecting early twentieth-century rare books felt...
View ArticleUniting Records from the Knoedler Archives for Provenance Research
In the game of connect the dots, a player draws lines between seemingly random points to reveal a recognizable picture. The process of connecting the 1.7 million records that constitute the Getty...
View ArticleHandling a Cosmic Book Object
Amid days filled with management and meetings, there is still time to steal away to the special collections. It’s there that the sublime sneaks in, peeking through the humdrum. As we prepared to create...
View ArticleMaria Sibylla Merian, Trailblazing Artist-Scientist of the Seventeenth Century
Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) was a woman far ahead of her time: a skilled, meticulous artist in an era when few women could participate in this profession; a self-taught entomologist, botanist, and...
View ArticlePreserving the Legacy of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building
In 1973, artist Judy Chicago, designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, and art historian Arlene Raven changed the cultural landscape by founding the Woman’s Building in downtown Los Angeles. For two...
View ArticleOttoman-Era Photographs Take on New Meaning in Their Digital Life
In the 1980s the French collector Pierre de Gigord traveled to Turkey and collected thousands of Ottoman-era photographs in a variety of media and formats. The resulting Pierre de Gigord Collection is...
View ArticlePODCAST: The Provocative Anti-Establishment Anti-Art of Fluxus
A new episode of the Art + Ideas Podcast How is dripping water into a vessel a musical performance? Or the release of a butterfly into a space? Or washing one’s face? These three events are all...
View ArticleInside a New Online Exhibition Featuring the Getty’s Bauhaus Archives
Launching today on getty.edu is the online exhibition Bauhaus: Building the New Artist, which has been more than a year in the making. The exhibition explores the Bauhaus school’s unique approach to...
View ArticleNotre-Dame’s Centuries of Survival, Captured in Art
The world came to a collective halt on April 15, 2019, when news broke that a fire was taking over Notre-Dame, an 850-year-old cathedral in the heart of Paris. Despite its age, the cathedral had...
View ArticleDeveloping an “Inner Feeling” for Materials with Paper Modeling at the Bauhaus
When Walter Gropius diagrammed the Bauhaus curriculum in 1922, he envisioned a school organized around the mastery of design and craft through a set of core materials: wood, metal, textiles, glass,...
View ArticlePODCAST: Teaching and Learning at the Bauhaus
A new episode of the Art + Ideas podcast This episode commemorates the hundredth anniversary of the opening of the Bauhaus, the influential school founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany....
View ArticleNotes From a 1930s School Trip to Notre-Dame de Paris
While preparing the exhibition An Enduring Icon. Notre-Dame Cathedral (Getty Center, July 23–October 20, 2019), I discovered many objects I could not include for space and conservation reasons....
View ArticleResearch to Shed Light on 20th-Century Trade in Mexican Antiquities
For three decades Los Angeles businessman Earl Stendahl was one of the world’s most influential dealers in pre-Hispanic art, using his genius for marketing to help shape museum and private collections...
View ArticlePODCAST: Collecting Käthe Kollwitz with Dr. Richard Simms
A new episode of the Art + Ideas podcast Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) was a prolific printmaker whose work explored painful themes such as hunger, poverty, and death. To achieve her powerful results, she...
View ArticlePODCAST: A Half-Century of Prints with Sidney Felsen of Gemini GEL
A new episode of the Art + Ideas podcast In 1966, at the age of forty-one, Sidney Felsen moved from the world of accounting to that of art, founding the artists’ workshop and fine-art print publisher...
View ArticlePODCAST: African American Art History at the Getty Research Institute
A new episode of the Art + Ideas podcast One of the many outcomes of the civil rights movement of the 1960s was the start of serious academic study of art of the African Diaspora, including by African...
View ArticleA Look Inside the Archive of Emmett Williams, Avant-Garde Poet and Artist
The Getty Research Institute recently acquired the second portion of poet and visual artist Emmett Williams’s archive, a trove curator Nancy Perloff plans to mine in the future as she explores ideas...
View ArticleReflections: Idurre Alonso on the Natural History of Brazil
A new episode of the Art + Ideas podcast We’ve asked curators from the Getty Museum and Getty Research Institute to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These...
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