New Getty shows will explore the wonders of light, medieval astrology, the microscopic, and what happens when you put artists and engineers in a room together
PST ART: Art & Science Collide, the next edition of Getty’s Pacific Standard Time arts initiative, will celebrate art and science’s intertwined histories and futures.
Sixty+ PST ART exhibitions will launch this fall around the Southern California region—along with many related events and publications—and several shows will open at the Getty Center starting in August. Here’s a preview.
Getty Exhibitions Inspired by Light
To be human is to crave light; we rise and sleep according to the rhythms of the sun. Light is necessary for vision and has spurred countless scientific discoveries and impacted many eras of art making. The complex and wondrous interplay among light, science, and art is a theme uniting eight of Getty’s PST ART exhibitions.
The major international loan exhibition Lumen: The Art and Science of Light delves into the inseparable histories of art and early scientific thought as interpreted through the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faiths in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Seven additional shows use a variety of media—painting, sculpture, manuscripts, photographs, film, prisms, and holograms—to demonstrate light’s many impacts on knowledge and art making. In a wide range of artworks and scientific tools, light is tracked across the night sky, bent and refracted, directed through lenses to reveal the unseen, or frozen in time.
Avant-garde photographers from the 1920s to the 1950s used experimental lighting effects to create abstract imagery. This exhibition features examples by international artists devoted to the practice, including Francis Bruguière, Jaromír Funke, Asahachi Kōno, Tōyō Miyatake, László Moholy-Nagy, and Man Ray. The selection of works illuminates the dynamic interplay among still photography, experimental
film, and the dazzling time-based artworks of Thomas Wilfred.
Made possible by the invention of laser technology in the 1960s, holograms produce the illusion of three-dimensional objects floating in space. Many artists have experimented with holography. For
example, Louise Bourgeois, Ed Ruscha, and others were invited by the C Project to explore the creative potential of the medium in the mid-1990s, and Deana Lawson turned to holography to expand her photographic practice around 2020. The master technician in both instances was Matthew Schreiber, an artist in his own right, whose work is also featured.
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 artworks by contemporary artists such as Vija Celmins, E.V. Day, and Helen Pashgian are placed in dialogue with historic objects.
A spectacular French microscope from the Museum’s collection is a unique testament to scientific advances and Rococo design in the Age of Enlightenment, the European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries. The microscope allowed science enthusiasts to immerse themselves in the recently discovered, and thrilling, world of the microscopically small. Visitors can look closely at this magnificent object, learn about its technical complexity, and see its lavish tooled leather case as well as specimen slides of the time.
Charles Ross in Solar Spectrum, Dwan Light Sanctuary, United World College, Montezuma, NM, 2023. Photo: Jeremy Frechette
June, from Psalter, about 1250–75, Swiss. Tempera colors and gold leaf on parchment. Getty Museum
Charles Ross’s Spectrum 14 is a calibrated array of prisms that casts a dazzling display of luminous color across the rotunda of the Museum’s Entrance Hall. Bands of spectral light traverse the space in relation to the sun, which appears to follow a slightly different arc through the sky every day, based on the Earth’s rotational orbit. These changes to the work connect us to the premodern experience of astronomical observation and calculation that defined cycles of days, seasons, and rituals. This new commission complements the exhibition Lumen: The Art and Science of Light.
Medieval Europeans believed that the movements of the sun, moon, stars, and planets directly affected their lives on Earth. They thought the positions of these celestial bodies had the power not only to
influence individual personalities but also to create 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, Rising Signs reveals the mysteries of medieval astrology as
it intersected with medicine, divination, and daily life in the Middle Ages.
Getty Conservation Institute scientist Vincent Beltran performs
microfadeometry on Vincent van Gogh’s Irises, a technique that reveals whether the paints are susceptible to discoloring upon exposure to light.
Longships Lighthouse, Land’s End, about 1834–35, Joseph Mallord William Turner. Watercolor and gouache, scraped by the artist. Getty Museum
Examining Getty’s much-loved canvas 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. The presentation allows
visitors to explore how conservators and scientists—working
together—can harness the power of light with analytical tools
to uncover an artist’s materials and working methods. Ultra-Violet also 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!
Artists have explored the interaction of paper and light for centuries. This exhibition of drawings charts some of the innovative ways the two media have been creatively used together. Works include the Museum’s extraordinary 12-foot-long transparency by Carmontelle—essentially an 18th-century motion picture—which is shown lit from behind, as originally intended. Drawings by Vija Celmins and other contemporary artists join works by Delacroix, Manet, Seurat, and Tiepolo to portray the themes of translucency and the representation of light.
September 10, 2024–February 23, 2025, Getty Research Institute
In 1966, Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, engineers at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, teamed up with artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman to form a new nonprofit,
Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Throughout its life, E.A.T. spawned collaborations between artists and engineers that had a significant impact on the interplay between art and science in the period. This exhibition highlights E.A.T.’s innovations in electronics and audience participation, celebrates the collaborations it fostered, and deepens our understanding of multimedia art in the 1960s and ’70s.
Scarlett Paulina De Leon, housing justice activist, Alta / A Human Atlas of a City of Angels
January 13 through April 27, 2025, Central Library
This social-impact art project by Marcus Lyon showcases 100
extraordinary people dedicated to creating positive change across Los Angeles County. Each participant is represented through photographic portraits, DNA maps, and interviews that reveal how their lives intersect with LA. The project includes an exhibition at LA Central Library, public activations across regional libraries and outdoor spaces downtown, a podcast, and an interactive book. Accompanying these is a mobile app that allows users to scan each participant’s portrait to listen to their oral histories. The project, a collaboration with the Getty Conservation Institute, builds on previous Human Atlas projects by Lyon across the globe: Somos Brasil (2016), WE: deutschland (2018), i.Detroit (2020), and De.Coded (2023).
More than 60 other PST ART: Art & Science Collide exhibitions
will open throughout Southern California this fall. To browse
the full list, visit https://pst.art.
