The Getty Center
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Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)
September 10, 2024–February 23, 2025
This exhibition showcases the mid-20th century collaboration between avant-garde artists and the engineers who created the information age. Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a non-profit organization, integrated theater, multi-sensory environments, and groundbreaking technology. Their pioneering efforts to facilitate cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration extended beyond the art world into social issues such as housing and environmental sustainability.
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Magnified Wonders: An 18th-Century Microscope
September 10, 2024–February 2, 2025
The spectacular French microscope from Getty’s collection is a unique testament to scientific advances and Rococo design in the Age of Enlightenment. It allowed science enthusiasts to immerse themselves in the recently discovered world of the microscopically small. New study and conservation present the cultural and historical context of this magnificent object and reveals its technical complexity in a display which includes its lavish tooled-leather case and specimen slides of natural curiosities.
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Lumen: The Art and Science of Light
September 10–December 8, 2024
Medieval artists created dazzling light-filled environments with gold, crystal, and glass evoking the layered realms of the divine. Long associated with divinity, light also occupied a central place in scientific inquiry. Today we tend to separate science from religion, but for medieval people these disciplines were firmly intertwined. Focusing on the arts of western Europe, this exhibition explores the ways that the science of light was studied by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers, theologians, and artists during the “Long Middle Ages” (800–1600). To convey the sense of wonder created by moving light on precious materials, several contemporary artworks are placed in dialogue with historic objects. Special installations by Helen Pashgian and Charles Ross extend Lumen throughout the Museum.
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Charles Ross: Spectrum 14
September 10, 2024–Ongoing
Spectrum 14 is a calibrated array of prisms that cast a dazzling display of luminous color across the Museum’s rotunda. Bands of spectral light traverse the space in relation to the sun, which follows a slightly different arc through the sky every day. Over time, Ross’s work changes in response to Earth’s rotational orbit, connecting us to the premodern experience of astronomical observation and calculation that defined cycles of days, seasons, and rituals.
This project was commissioned for PST ART as part of the exhibition Lumen: The Art and Science of Light. This is the second “Rotunda Commission,” a series of art installations inspired by the Getty Museum’s collection, architecture, and site. -
Rising Signs: The Medieval Science of Astrology
October 1, 2024–January 5, 2025
Medieval Europeans believed that the movements of the sun, moon, stars, and planets directly affected their lives on earth. The position of these celestial bodies had the power to not only influence individual personalities but also created the seasonal conditions ideal for a variety of tasks from planting crops to bloodletting. Exploring the 12 signs of the zodiac still familiar to us today, this exhibition reveals the mysteries of medieval astrology as it intersected with medicine, divination, and daily life in the Middle Ages.
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Ultra-Violet: New Light on Van Gogh’s Irises
October 1, 2024–January 19, 2025
Examine Getty’s much-loved painting, Irises by Vincent Van Gogh, from the perspective of modern conservation science. This exhibition shows how the artist’s understanding of light and color informed his painting practice, and how conservators and scientists working together can harness the power of light with analytical tools that uncover the artist’s materials and working methods. Lastly, the exhibition reveals how light has irrevocably changed some of the colors in Irises. A painting we thought we knew so well has suddenly become quite unfamiliar.
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Paper and Light
October 15, 2024–January 19, 2025
Artists have for centuries explored the interaction of paper and light. This exhibition of drawings charts some of the innovative ways in which the two media were creatively used together. Works include the Museum’s extraordinary 12-foot-long transparency by Carmontelle—essentially an 18th-century motion picture—which will be shown lit from behind as originally intended. Drawings by more contemporary artists including Vija Celmins will join sheets by Tiepolo, Delacroix, Seurat, and Manet to portray the themes of translucency and the representation of light.
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Exploring the Alps
November 12, 2024–April 27, 2025
Based around Giovanni Segantini’s monumental pastel Study for “La Vita” depicting the Alpine peaks that ringed his home in the Engadine Valley in Switzerland, this focused exhibition highlights the different ways in which later 19th-century artists explored and depicted the Alps. Themes include the joys and difficulties of working outdoors and the connections between the land and its inhabitants.
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María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold
February 11–May 4, 2025
Cuban-born Campos-Pons makes vivid photographs, watercolors, installations, and performances that trace the cultural and personal impacts of migration and memory. Her works reflect global histories of labor as they affected her family through enslavement, indenture, and motherhood, emphasizing resilience and respect for her Nigerian and Chinese ancestors. This survey of 35 years of artmaking and activism highlights the interconnectedness between people and their environments, offering an expansive, incisive, and sensorial experience.
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Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men
February 25–May 25, 2025
French painter Gustave Caillebotte’s interest in male subjects sharply distinguishes him from his Impressionist peers. Overwhelmingly, he observed and depicted the men in his life—including his brothers, bachelor friends, fellow sportsmen, and the workers and bourgeois of his neighborhood—and did so in bracingly original paintings that often subverted artistic and gender norms. His distinctive vision of modern masculinity is considered here for the first time in a major international loan exhibition.
Co-organized with the Musée d’Orsay, Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago. -
What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women 1843–1999
April 8–May 11, 2025
This pop-up reading room surveys a global history of photobooks by women photographers from the Getty Library. As part of an international series showcasing the 10×10 Photobooks' catalog What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women 1843–1999, it offers an inclusive revision and remapping of the photobook canon. It is complemented by notable photobooks by Southern California women artists after 2000.
The Getty Villa
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Ancient Thrace and the Classical World: Treasures from Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece
November 4, 2024–March 3, 2025
The ancient land of Thrace, on the northern border of Greece (comprising present-day Bulgaria and parts of Romania), was home to a tribal culture that produced superb gold, silver, and bronze works used in aristocratic pursuits, such as warfare, horsemanship, and banqueting. This exhibition features many objects that were discovered in spectacular Thracian burial mounds. At various times adversaries and allies of the Greeks, the Thracians were greatly influenced by Greek art but created their own distinctive style.
Part of Getty’s program The Classical World in Context. Organized in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture, Republic of Bulgaria.