For the Getty Center’s 25th anniversary, we asked people from the Los Angeles community to reflect on the Getty Center. Listen to all the reflections on the GettyGuide® app.
Tanya Wolfe-Ragir, sculptor
I’m a sculptor and this is what I do, all I do. My primary focus as an artist has always been the female form. I sculpt from inches to monumental. I sculpted both representationally but also work with wall pieces and totems and grids.
One of my favorite things about the Getty is getting off the tram and approaching the stairs and this beautiful reclining piece that’s cast in lead. It’s called L’Air. I love seeing it as I’m coming and saying goodbye to it as I’m leaving.
There’s something about this that is not like other pieces. It’s not romanticized. I think that because it’s so atypical, both in the body form, in the balance, in the relatability, all kinds of women can walk up to that and go, “I can see myself in that. I can feel myself in that.”
The woman who modeled for this piece was Dina Vierny. She was born in 1919 and died in 2009, just a couple weeks shy of her 90th birthday. She was born in Kishinev Bessarabia [what is now the Republic of Moldova and a small piece of southern Ukraine] to a Jewish family.
She became a singer, a French art dealer, a collector, and ultimately a museum director. She met Aristide Maillol when she was 15. They worked together for the last 10 years of his life. Other pieces he did with her were Mountain Air, The Air, The Seated Bather, The River, and Harmony, which he never finished.
She was part of the resistance movement in World War II. She was arrested twice. Eventually, when Maillol died in a car accident, she opened the museum in Paris, which is in his name. Her collections that are in it are Degas and Kandinski and Picasso and Duchamp. She’s won the Legion of Honor. She was this extraordinary woman. That speaks a little bit to who she was.
I remember the first time I came up to the Getty Center. My daughter was probably about just a year old, and we brought her up to see a live music concert and enjoy the surroundings. It sits on top of the mountains and has a commanding view of both the Pacific Ocean, the Santa Monica Mountains, as well as Los Angeles. It’s beautiful.
For all of us living in and around the Santa Monica Mountains, it’s good to remember that the open space is there for a reason, and we need to protect it. It’s one of the reasons why people want to live up there.
Los Angeles is the only metropolis that is bisected by a mountain range. And that is the Santa Monica Mountains. And the natural recreation area provides people opportunities to get out into nature away from the city, enjoy the natural environment, the vistas, the views, and exercise. All of that is good for us.
We all need places to get away and have an opportunity to reset our mental clock and to enjoy and get away from the rat race and the hustle and bustle that can often come with living in a metropolis.
Sandy Rodriguez, artist, and researcher
When you take the tram up to the top of the Getty Center, you walk up some very dramatic steps, and over to the right-hand side is this beautiful terrace with a majestic oak on your left, and on your right an entire bed of bird of paradise that greets you and leads you to the entrance of the Getty Research Institute, which is my favorite place on the campus up here at the Getty Center.
This art library contains floors and floors and floors of books and special collections and exhibitions around art and art history. On the Plaza level, you have an opportunity to browse dozens and dozens and dozens of books that are focused on Los Angeles. You have access to these book scanners to be able to scan materials that you want PDFs of to review later. You can look up any subject of art and art history and go down and just browse the entire section of books
My work, the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón, is a series of maps and objects that interrogate cycles of violence that have been in existence since the colonial period and inflicted upon communities of color in the United States and in Mexico. The research that is important for me to integrate in this project helps me understand and explain through these objects how we have arrived at this moment in 2022.
It requires a lot of historic research with a variety of sources, and many of those sources are available here at the Getty Research Institute.
