Event Calendar
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Performances and Films/Videos
Lectures and Conferences
Tours and Talks
Family Activities
Courses and Demonstrations
Exhibitions
Readings and Book Signings
Japanese American National Museum
Hammer Museum
Museum of Latin American Art
Autry National Center
Huntington Library
LACMA
Los Angeles Public Library
MAK Center for Art & Architecture
MoCA
Natural History Museum
Norton Simon Museum
Orange County Museum of Art
Pacific Asia Museum
Pasadena Museum of California Art
Skirball Cultural Center
UCLA Fowler Museum
May 1, 2008
Courses and Demonstrations
Artist-at-Work Demonstration: Marquetry
Thursdays and Sundays through May 8, 2008
1 pm - 3 pm
Museum Studios, Getty Center


Drop by as traditional cabinetmaker Patrick Edwards demonstrates materials and techniques for making marquetry, a decorative, inlaid veneer that can be found on many furniture pieces in the Getty's decorative arts collection.

Tours and Gallery Talks
California Video Orientation Talk
Daily through June 8, 2008
12 pm, 1:30 pm
Museum Entrance Hall, Getty Center


Join a Museum educator before or after your visit to the California Video exhibition to hear a brief overview and participate in a 15-minute question and answer session. Meet at the Museum Information Desk.

Getty Center
Architecture Tour
Tuesdays - Thursdays and Sundays through June 29, 2008
10:15 am, 11 am, 1 pm, 2 pm, 3 pm
Museum Entrance Hall, Getty Center


Getty Center architecture tours are offered daily by docents. Tours last 30–45 minutes. Meet outside in front of the Museum Entrance Hall.

Halberdier / Pontormo
Collection Highlights Tour
Daily through June 29, 2008
11 am
Museum Galleries, Getty Center


This one-hour tour provides an overview of major works from the Museum's collection. Offered in English and Spanish on weekends. Meet at the Museum Information Desk.

Central Garden
Garden Tour
Daily through June 29, 2008
11:30 am, 12:30 pm, 2:30 pm, 3:30 pm
Central Garden, Getty Center


Garden Tours are offered daily by docents. They focus on the Central Garden and landscaping of the Getty Center site. Tours last 45–60 minutes. Meet in front of the Museum Entrance Hall.

Neoclassicism
Focus Tour: Neoclassical and Romantic Art
Thursdays through June 30, 2008
3 pm
Museum Galleries, Getty Center


Enjoy a one-hour tour focusing on neoclassicism and romanticism in the Getty's collection by exploring the art and culture of these related and distinctive movements of the 18th- and 19th-centuries. Meet at the Museum Information Desk.

Exhibitions
Classical Connections: The Enduring Influence of Greek and Roman Art
Daily through December 31, 2009

North Pavilion, Plaza Level, Getty Center


This installation of antiquities demonstrates the relationship of ancient art to later work, showing some of the themes, techniques, and motifs borrowed by later artists—from mythology to decorative design—and the approach to the human figure known today as the classical ideal. This permanent collection installation is on view in the North Pavilion.

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Please Be Seated: A Video Installation by Nicole Cohen
Daily through January 11, 2009

South Pavilion, Plaza Level, Getty Center


Internationally recognized video artist Nicole Cohen (American, b. 1970) explores the intersection of historical interiors, the social behaviors they conditioned, contemporary popular culture, and fantasy. Her project for the Getty Museum focuses on the Museum's collection of French seating furniture and its original and museological contexts. Viewers are invited to engage in a participatory experience, forming personal, imaginative narratives through video projections that render the chairs virtually accessible.

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Consuming Passion: Fragonard's Allegories of Love
Daily through May 4, 2008

West Pavilion, Plaza Level, Getty Center


This small, focused exhibition assembles a group of paintings, drawings, and prints—for the first time—to examine the late allegories of love by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806). This project comes out of research based on the Getty Museum's painting, The Fountain of Love, which was acquired in 1999. The exhibition concentrates on the extraordinary, and still little-known, later works of Fragonard, in which he embarked on a series of dramatic reflections on the subject of romantic love, adopting a newly-restrained palette and allegorical vocabulary, while retaining his famously fluid and effortless handling.

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Ten Years of Drawings: What, How, and Why
Daily through May 4, 2008

West Pavilion, Plaza Level, Getty Center


This exhibition celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Getty Center and the growth of the drawings collection during the decade. With an emphasis on showing how and why works are selected for acquisition, the exhibition provides a glimpse into the process by which works enter the collection, as well as a compelling survey of some of the drawings acquired. Highlights include an important transfer-drawing by Gauguin, 18th-century drawings by Guardi, Canaletto, Rosalba Carriera, and the Tiepolos, and rare examples from the early German school, including works by an Upper Rhenish Master and a follower of the Housebook Master.

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Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky
Daily through June 8, 2008

Research Institute Exhibition Gallery, Getty Center


Bernard Rudofsky (American, 1905–1988, born in Austria) was an architect, curator, critic, exhibition designer, and fashion designer whose entire oeuvre was influenced by his lifelong interest in people's concepts about the body. He is as well known for his controversial exhibitions and publications as he is for the design of the popular Bernardo sandals in the 1950s and 1960s. Co-organized by the Getty Research Institute (GRI) and the Architekturzentrum Wien, Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky illustrates Rudofsky's thought process through the diverse presentation of sketches, architectural models, travel notebooks, photographs, sculptures, fabrics, and footwear drawn heavily from the Rudofsky archive of the Research Library at the GRI. The exhibition premiered at the Architekturzentrum Wien in spring 2007 and travels to the Canadian Centre for Architecture before opening at the Getty in spring 2008.

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California Video
Daily through June 8, 2008

Exhibitions Pavilion, Getty Center


The first comprehensive survey of California video art from 1968 to the present, this exhibition includes important examples of single-channel video, video sculpture, and video installation. Featuring the work of 58 artists, duos, and collectives, California Video locates a distinctively West Coast aesthetic within the broader history of video art while highlighting the Getty's major commitment to the preservation and exhibition of a young but vital artistic medium. This exhibition is co-organized by the Getty Research Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

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Ten Years in Focus: The Artist and the Camera
Daily through August 10, 2008

West Pavilion, Terrace Level, Getty Center


This exhibition of notable acquisitions that have entered the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in the past ten years brings together two complementary aspects of the medium of photography: a "painterly" approach used by many artists to set their work apart from that of practitioners of a more documentary style, and the apparatus integral to the resulting pictures. Whether the connection to painting is in the form of traditional subject matter (portraits, landscapes), one-of-a-kind prints, or the translation of a painterly vocabulary into a photograph, artists are always drawn to new materials. The pictures and the equipment presented here provide insight into photography as a unique marriage of art and technology.

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May 1, 2008
Lectures and Conferences
Color in Classical Sculpture: A Challenge to Western Ideals
Thursday May 1, 2008
8 pm
Auditorium, Getty Villa


The idea that ancient Greek and Roman statuary was conceived in white marble remains pervasive. This has influenced not only our understanding of sculpture in Antiquity but also the aesthetic ideals of later Western art and architecture—ideals that are part of our cultural identity. But interdisciplinary research demonstrates that color was inherent to ancient statuary. Jan Stubbe Østergaard, curator of ancient art at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, surveys our knowledge of ancient sculptural polychromy and discusses its repercussions.


Tours and Gallery Talks
Getty Villa Inner Peristyle
Orientation Tour
Daily through June 30, 2008
10:30 am, 12:30 pm, 2:30 pm
Getty Villa


This 40-minute tour offers an overview of the Getty Villa, focusing on its architecture and educational mission. Meet at the Tour Meeting Place outside the Museum Store.

Getty Villa Outer Peristyle
Getty Villa Architecture and Gardens Tour
Daily through June 30, 2008
11:30 am, 1:30 pm, 3:30 pm
Museum, Getty Villa


This 40-minute tour explores the architecture and gardens of the Getty Villa and their historical prototypes. Meet at the Tour Meeting Place outside the Museum Store.

Spotlight Talk
Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays through August 31, 2009
11 am
Museum Galleries, Getty Villa


This 20-minute gallery talk introduces ways of looking at ancient art through an in-depth exploration of one object in the collection. Space is limited. Sign up at the Tour Meeting Place outside the Museum Store 15 minutes before the talk.

Lansdowne Herakles
Collection Highlights Tour
Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays through June 30, 2008
2 pm
Museum Galleries, Getty Villa


This one-hour tour provides an overview of major works from the Museum's collection. Offered in English and Spanish on weekends. Meet at the Tour Meeting Place outside the Museum Main Entrance beginning at 1:45 p.m.

Exhibitions
The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present
Daily through June 23, 2008

Museum, Floor 2, Getty Villa


Focusing on representations of the human figure, this exhibition explores the role of color in sculpture and its place in Western taste. Ancient, medieval, and early Renaissance statues were regularly painted, but Neoclassical collecting interests and aesthetic concerns have privileged monochrome marble and bronze. Following recent research on ancient pigments, The Color of Life includes a variety of masterpieces that reveal the lifelike qualities of polychrome statues fashioned over the course of four millennia.

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The Hope Hygieia: Restoring a Statue's History
Daily through September 8, 2008

Museum, Getty Villa


A Roman marble statue of Hygieia, ancient goddess of health, was found at Ostia in 1797 and restored shortly thereafter. The sculpture was first acquired by the British interior designer Thomas Hope and was later owned by American newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. The figure's 19th-century restorations were removed in the 1970s, but these historical additions were recently reintegrated at the Getty Villa. On loan from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hope Hygieia exemplifies evolving attitudes toward the restoration and display of classical sculpture on the part of collectors, curators, and conservators.