The programs range from cutting-edge performing arts commissions to rocket launches, and from participatory art projects and action-centered discussions to a free outdoor art and science family festival—all on the theme of Art & Science Collide.
Starting in September 2024 and continuing for five months, PST ART: Art & Science Collide will comprise more than 60 deeply researched exhibitions developed by arts organizations and scientific institutions throughout Southern California, featuring over 800 artists in mind-expanding explorations of topics ranging from ancient cosmology to Indigenous sci-fi, and from artificial intelligence to environmental justice. The new public programs organized by partner organizations, community-based groups, and Getty itself will make Art & Science Collide not only the largest art project in the United States but also an innovative model for public programming at an unprecedented scale.
Katherine E. Fleming, President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, said, “Like a productive collision that sets objects spinning off in new directions, the programs we announce today will move audiences toward fresh insights and illuminating encounters. We’re proud that Getty is heightening the already exceptional ambitions of Art & Science Collide by enabling our partners to present these lively, involving, and diverse programs starting less than a year from now.”
As part of its major public outreach, Getty will join with the internationally renowned Edinburgh Science organization in November 2024 to present a free, three-day PST ART x Science Family Festival. Offering participatory hands-on workshops, roving demonstrations, a full performance slate, and a celebratory atmosphere with music and food, the outdoor festival will bring the theme of Art & Science Collide to children ages 4 to 14 and their families.
Dr. Simon Gage OBE, CEO and director of Edinburgh Science, said, “It is particularly exciting for a Scottish organization to be immersed in the intense creativity of the artistic, scientific, and technological communities of the greater Los Angeles area. We are simply delighted to work with Getty and the extraordinary PST ART partners on the Art x Science Family Festival. We are united by a passion for staging exceptional and exciting interactive events that both amaze and enable learning and discovery.”
New grants announced today, which bring Getty’s support for Art & Science Collide to $19 million, will fund dozens of engaging public programs throughout Southern California organized by CaltechLive; Clockshop; Crenshaw Dairy Mart; The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens; L.A. Dance Project; LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab; LA Phil; The Music Center; The New Children’s Museum; REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater); Skirball Cultural Center; and the University of Southern California.
Among the participatory programs will be The Music Center’s presentation of The Gift, a meditation on astrophysics in which an outdoor plaza will become a music-filled “reading room” where participants encounter an illustrated book based on the research of Dr. Natalie Gosnell, associate professor of physics at Colorado College. Commenting on the collaboration, Gosnell said, “Astrophysics is really a discipline of storytelling, where we use clues gathered from telescopes to better understand objects in the sky. With The Gift, my co-creators and I tell a story inspired by my astrophysics research in a way that is inviting, welcoming, and weaves together themes of grief, loss, and renewal. We are thrilled to participate in PST ART: Art & Science Collide and bring The Gift to Los Angeles.”
Three organizations—La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, LA Commons, and the Lancaster Museum of Art and History—have joined Getty as community hubs for Art & Science Collide. Helping to bring the initiative to people where they live, the hubs will engage nearby grassroots organizations, public agencies, STEAM educators, and young creatives to develop and present their own programs on the Art & Science Collide themes. Offerings will range from art workshops to habitat restoration projects.
Other groundbreaking programs that increase public outreach in multiple locations, from San Diego to Northeast L.A., will take place throughout the duration of Art & Science Collide as PST ART Weekends. These Getty-supported events will make PST ART a “festival of festivals,” bringing together neighboring institutions. Each weekend will serve as an audience magnet for exhibition-hopping, socializing, and evening-hour capstone performances programmed by PST ART partners.
Programs that kick off PST ART Weekends will include an evening in the Quantum Vibrations series curated by Josh Kun, a professor in the USC Annenberg School and Vice Provost for the Arts at USC. “I am honored to be working with Getty again on PST ART,” Kun said. “My series explores the intersection of art and science through the work of artists who think about music in scientific contexts and use music to pose scientific questions, about everything from speculative world-making to non-human music makers to quantum approaches to listening. I’m especially excited these encounters will take place in neighborhoods across the city.”
As in past editions of PST ART, galleries throughout Los Angeles and Southern California designated as affiliates will present dozens of independently organized exhibitions on the initiative’s theme. As previously announced, Getty also has formed a partnership with Frieze, amplifying the presence of Art & Science Collide internationally.
Highlights of Partner Programming
Beginning in September 2024, audiences will be invited to participate in a broad range of events and public programs organized by PST ART partners, such as:
Blasting Off with Art & Science Collide
• LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab will produce The Monophobic Response, a performance by American Artist reimagining a rocket engine test that was carried out in Arroyo Seco Canyon in 1936 by the precursor to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. American Artist’s performance will involve the launch of an accurate replica of the rocket engine, with performers taking the role of the fictional Earthseed community in Octavia E. Butler’s Afrofuturist series of Parable novels.
• The Wende Museum, an art museum, cultural center, and archive of the Cold War that is an exhibition partner in Art & Science Collide, will also help the collaboration “lift off” by sending a replica of the first artificial Earth satellite into orbit on October 4, 2024, the 67th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik. This ambitious performative project on the culture of science is being designed and implemented by participants in Stanford University’s Student Space Initiative, under the auspices of Wende and PST ART. Like Sputnik itself, the students’ satellite will send data back to Earth, in this case including news about Art & Science Collide.
Bringing Science to the Stage and Art to the Observatory
• The biological basis of empathy will be the foundation of the L.A. Dance Project’s Resonance, featuring commissioned dance works by outstanding contemporary choreographers in collaboration with research scientists. Each performance of Resonance will be followed by a guided audience discussion about empathy and a call-to-action in partnership with a community organization.
• Taking complex ideas in astrophysics and translating them into a moving and accessible narrative for people of all ages, The Music Center will present The Gift, for which an outdoor plaza will become an intimate “reading room” augmented with a musical score and digital interventions. The Gift will also be mounted at the historic Mount Wilson Observatory overlooking Pasadena.
• The practice of field recording—capturing audio outside the studio from sources as varied as underwater sounds, electromagnetic vibrations, or insect activity—will be the focus of LA Phil’s Noon to Midnight festival of new music, animating every part of the Walt Disney Concert Hall campus with sound installations and live performances. The event will feature well-known and emerging composers, performers, and ensembles, culminating in a work created by a major cross-disciplinary artist with the LA Phil and Los Angeles Master Chorale.
PST ART Weekends from Montecito Heights to South Broadway
• PST ART Weekends will kick off in October 2024 with a live performance at Debs Park by Black Quantum Futurism, co-founded by Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) and Rasheedah Phillips, artists at the vanguard of Black musical futurism and audio world-making. Their performance is part of Quantum Vibrations, a four-part series of performances curated by Josh Kun, Professor and Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication at the USC Annenberg School.
• PST ART Weekends will come to a close in December 2024 with Live Night: Cruising Bodies, Spirits, and Machines, a celebratory evening at the iconic, 1,600-seat theater at Ace Hotel co-presented by REDCAT and UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance. Featuring various experimental performances, Live Night is inspired by REDCAT’s exhibition in Art & Science Collide, which rethinks artificial intelligence through Indigenous, Brown, and Queer perspectives.
Food, Water, and Grassroots Activism
• Crenshaw Dairy Mart will organize a season of workshops, conversations, and community events around its abolitionist pods—autonomously irrigated, solar-powered gardens in geodesic domes, designed by the Inglewood-based arts non-profit to serve communities across L.A. County impacted by food insecurity, housing insecurity, and the prison industrial complex.
• Clockshop will engage communities along the L.A. River in Northeast L.A. with art workshops, ecological restoration, and artist-led nature experiences to foster an understanding of human/water interactions in their own backyards from parking lots to wetlands.
Gathering Young People to Confront Climate Change
• Skirball Cultural Center will present a program featuring young climate activists, poets, and artists who bring an intersectional approach to combatting the devastating effects of climate change.
• The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens will be the site of a large-scale youth summit on sustainability and climate change. Bringing together as many as 300 high-school students, the summit will center youth-driven solutions to the climate crisis.
A complete list of programs by the 12 grant-funded partner organizations and three community hubs may be found online. Additional information on programs will be available closer to the launch of PST ART: Art & Science Collide.
About PST ART: Art & Science Collide
Southern California’s landmark arts event Pacific Standard Time—now PST ART—returns in September 2024 with more than 60 exhibitions from museums and other institutions across the region, all exploring the intersections of art and science, both past and present. Dozens of cultural, scientific, and community organizations will join the latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, to share groundbreaking research, create indelible experiences for the public, and generate new ways of understanding our complex world. Art & Science Collide follows Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (September 2017–January 2018), which presented a paradigm-shifting examination of Latin American and Latinx art, and Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 (October 2011–March 2012), which rewrote the history of the birth and impact of the LA art scene. PST ART is a Getty initiative. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit: pst.art
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