This rare archive from Ed Ruscha comprises hundreds of contact sheets, hundreds of thousands of negatives, and a wide range of production materials. The Streets of Los Angeles Archive reveals a systematic effort to capture the city's architecture and thoroughfares by one of its leading postwar art figures. Spanning more than 40 years, this project documents many major streets, including Melrose Avenue, Pacific Coast Highway, and the iconic Sunset Boulevard.

Learn more about this archive.

Exhibition through February 5, 2012

In the postwar years, George Herms and other California assemblage artists experimented with ways art could be exhibited and experienced. The highly personalized handmade cards that Herms mailed to and received from fellow artists and friends—currently on display in Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics, 1950–1980—attest to the belief in art's power to bring individuals together as a community.

Learn more about this exhibition.

Watch artist George Herms share his work with curator John Tain.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011
7:00 p.m.
Harold M. Williams Auditorium, The Getty Center

The GRI collaborates with the Getty Conservation Institute to present a special evening with artist De Wain Valentine in conjunction with the exhibition From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine's Gray Column. This conversation investigates the production, conservation, and display challenges that surround Valentine's monumental polyester resin sculpture, Gray Column.

Learn more and reserve a free ticket to this event.

Friday, November 4, 2011
10:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
Auditorium, The Getty Villa
Fee: $20/$10 students, pre-registration required

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Modern Antiquity: Picasso, de Chirico, Léger, and Picabia in the Presence of the Antique on view at the Getty Villa beginning November 2, this one-day symposium brings together experts to discuss the role "modern classicism" has played in the understanding of both modernism and the classical past.

Learn more and register for this event.

Saturday, November 12, 2011
1:00 p.m.–6:00 p.m.
Museum Lecture Hall, The Getty Center

A panel of artists and scholars explores the ways contemporary artists incorporate archives into their work. Invited speakers George Herms, Suzanne Lacy, Mario Garcia Torres, and Sven Spieker discuss how archives can go beyond documentation to inspire and inform artistic practices—at times becoming part of the work itself. This event is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics, 1950–1980.

Learn more and reserve a ticket to this free event.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011
7:00 p.m.
Harold M. Williams Auditorium, The Getty Center

Los Angeles artists Ed Bereal, Mel Edwards, George Herms, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, and Betye Saar discuss how they and other artists employed assemblage sculpture as a way to reflect on the charged political climate of postwar America. This discussion explores how the medium of assemblage sculpture emerged and continues to thrive as a tool of social critique and transformation.

Learn more and reserve a ticket to this free event.

Live Streaming

An international group of scholars, curators, museum directors, and artists discuss new approaches to the study and presentation of Latin American art in the 21st century. This second symposium in Lima, Peru, continues the discussion that began in Los Angeles in March 2011, while taking the debate to a new and more conclusive level.

Watch live streaming on November 2, 3, and 4 on MOLAA's website.

Digital Collection

This pair of sketchbooks (1917–32) by the German expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner contains sketches in pencil, ink, charcoal, and chalk; watercolors of landscapes, portraits, studies of athletes; and preliminary drawings in pencil, ink, and watercolor for Apokalypse.

View the digital collection.

Finding Aid

German-born art and architectural historian, editor, and professor Nikolaus Pevsner is best known as a prolific scholar of European architecture. This recently processed collection of papers relates primarily to Pevsner's work during the 1960s and 1970s, including publications, speaking engagements, pedagogical research, and his membership on boards and committees, such as the Council of Bauhaus. The material fills an important gap in the GRI's larger collection of Pevsner papers.

Browse the finding aid.

Browse the finding aid for the larger Pevsner collection.






Banner image: Card to George Herms, Dean Stockwell, 1966. The Getty Research Institute, 2009.M.20. Gift of George Herms. © Dean Stockwell