But it’s important that we do look back—so we can evolve, and so we can remind ourselves that more often than not, during the darkest periods in our history, we have hunkered down, risen to the occasion, and ultimately discovered better ways to be.
I am deeply proud of how staff, working from makeshift home offices since March 2020, quickly offered an all-digital experience of Getty so as to provide the distraction, sense of community, and cheer we all desperately needed. Over the course of FY21 Getty created the innovative websites Return to Palmyra and 12 Sunsets: Exploring Ed Ruscha’s Archive, as well as 22 presentations on arts platform Google Arts & Culture. Our social media challenge to recreate artworks using everyday objects inspired enough brilliant submissions to fill a book. And through hundreds of virtual programs, events, art stories, and podcasts, by year’s end we were reaching more than 50 million people monthly in a consistent upwards trend.
When the Villa and Center reopened in the spring, we welcomed visitors back with Mesopotamia: Civilization Begins, a major exhibition at the Villa co-organized by the Louvre, which had been gracious enough to extend the loan of many of its objects on view. Visitors at both sites could now enjoy the GettyGuide, a free app created with pandemic safety measures in mind that brought event, exhibition, dining, and shopping information right to their phones, and in 10 languages. The galleries were spanking clean—taking advantage of a long period of no visitors in the galleries, we dusted every nook and rid every crevice of moths, the bane of many a museum—and outside our gardeners had added new blooms to our colorful displays as part of long-delayed projects.
Other behind-the-scenes work conducted during Covid: research on pigments Van Gogh used in his Irises, a work so popular we hadn’t taken it off view for 30 years; the granting of $36.1 million to 90 nonprofits impacted by Covid; a final round of grants to conserve significant 20th-century buildings around the world; art historical research on fragmented objects by 43 scholars; and a report on the impact of the Getty Marrow internships, a long-standing program designed to diversify the museum field.
The Getty Marrow program is only a small part of Getty’s ongoing diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion (DEAI) work; and against the backdrop of the George Floyd protests and calls on social media for art institutions to recognize their white dominant culture, we doubled down on our DEAI work. In mid-July of 2020 14 Trustees (including our newest board member, business executive Jaynie Miller Studenmund), 15 Task Forces engaging dozens of employees, and multiple DEAI committees and working groups began collaborating on a comprehensive five-goal plan. Much change is already underway, as you’ll see in the stories below about projects sparked by the plan: the Los Angeles African American Historic Places Project, new Post-Baccalaureate arts conservation internships, the exhibition Photo Flux: Unshuttering LA, and the Research Institute archivists’ anti-racist re-examination of thousands of records. You can read about more DEAI-related progress in our first Annual Report.
Know that our DEAI work has only just begun. I might not be at Getty to witness the changes—last June I announced that I will retire after serving Getty for 10 tremendous years, a period of my life I will truly cherish. But I will stay on until my successor is in place, and as president emeritus will continue to work on projects related to the greater understanding and conservation of the world’s cultural heritage, only one of the many goals Getty has wholeheartedly embraced in its desire to make our world a better place, no matter what life throws us.
