Overdrive is the first major museum exhibition to survey Los Angeles's built environment and offers a view of the region's diverse and often underappreciated urban landscape, including its ambitious freeway network, sleek corporate towers, whimsical coffee shops, popular shopping malls, refined steel-and-glass residences, and eclectic cultural institutions. Co-organized by the Getty Research Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum, this exhibition is part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.

Plan your visit.

Buy the exhibition catalog.

More about Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.

In Focus: Ed Ruscha offers a concentrated look at the artist's engagement with Los Angeles's vernacular architecture, the urban landscape, and car culture. The exhibition, co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and Getty Research Institute, highlights three of Ruscha's best-known photo books, including Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). Also on view, for the very first time, will be photographs of Pacific Coast Highway taken in 1974.

Read about the exhibition.

Learn more about the Streets of Los Angeles Archive.

Described by scholars and friends as an alchemical filmmaker, musical archaeologist, and avant-garde shaman, Harry Smith was a major cult figure among Beat artists and poets. This archive consists of writings on film projects and ethnography, documents and photographs related to Smith's early interest in Pacific Northwest Indians, and other items from Smith's personal collections.

Read about the archive.

Find out more about the contents of Smith's collections.

In 1972, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Isenour documented Las Vegas's postwar urban landscape from a moving car. The resulting publication, Learning from Las Vegas, marked the postmodern turn in architectural theory. In Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror, Martino Stierli reevaluates Venturi's controversial text by looking at its impact on contemporary art and visual media.

Buy the book.

Postwar Japanese art took its cue from Dadaism's moral outrage and experimental techniques. This set of videos documents a weekend of performance, film, and discussion about vanguard Japanese art practices between 1950 and 1975, including Ushio Shinohara's Boxing Painting, in which Shinohara punches his canvas with gloves dipped in bright paint.

Watch the videos.

With its focus on living artists, Milan's Galleria dell'Ariete, founded by Beatrice Monti della Corte, became one of Italy's foremost contemporary art galleries. This archive includes the Galleria's complete business records, documenting its extensive connections with dealers, collectors, artists, and critics in Europe, Japan, and the United States.

View finding aid.

Read about Beatrice Monti della Corte's relationship with Leo Castelli.








Banner image: LAX Theme Building by Pereira & Luckman, Welton Becket & Associates, and Paul R. Williams, drawing completed 1958, construction completed 1961. Alan E. Leib Collection. Image courtesy and copyright Luckman Salas O'Brien