Grants Awarded

Below is a list of grants awarded for PST ART: Art & Science Collide exhibitions, public programming, and community hubs, followed by a list of non-grant-supported exhibitions. For a list of all Art & Science Collide grants, visit our Grants Database.

Exhibitions
Public Programming and Community Hubs
Non-grant-supported Exhibitions

---

Exhibitions

Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (for two exhibitions)
Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema

From hand-tinted silent films to digital film production, color has always played an essential role in creating cinematic landscapes and narratives. Color in Motion explores the power of color as a filmmaking tool, the science and technologies behind it, and its physical and psychological impact on audiences. The story of color is told in high-energy film clips, photographs, posters, production cels, color charts, equipment, and iconic costumes and props such as a costume worn by Kim Novak in Vertigo. Color in Motion also reveals the many contributions women made to the history of film colors—laboriously hand-coloring and stenciling, working in Disney’s ink and paint department, and serving as the generally white “leader ladies” to whose skin tones film colors were calibrated—raising questions about the role of race and gender in film color development. Immersive spaces and interactive installations include a hands-on “color arcade” that invites visitors to move their bodies to activate colors, allowing them to see, create, and experience color in motion.

Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema

Cyberpunk examines the global impact and lasting influence of the science fiction subgenre on cinema culture. Featuring near-future scenarios that are earthbound rather than in outer space, Cyberpunk films juxtapose technological advances with social disorder, envisioning a future characterized by alienation, totalitarianism, and urban decay. The Academy Museum’s exhibition features production materials, costumes, props, and concept art from iconic Cyberpunk films like Blade Runner (US, 1982), Tron (US, 1982), and The Matrix (US, 1999), and also spotlights international films such as Sleep Dealer (Mexico/US, 2008) and foundational animated features like Akira (Japan, 1988). At the exhibition’s core, an immersive installation illustrate the genre’s 20th-century origins and the new, global directions it has taken in the 21st century as Cyberpunk has expanded and merged with Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurism, and other genres. Through these films, the exhibition confronts the ongoing challenges of climate change, capitalism, and colonialism and offer visions of possible futures.

Exhibition research support: $200,000 (2020); Implementation support: $400,000 (2023)

Armory Center for the Arts
From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments

What happens when populations that depend on international supply chains for basic needs are systemically cut off from food production? And when power grids fail, and reservoirs dry up? For decades, artists, writers, and scientists have imagined the consequences of severe disruptions to the economy and the environment. Taking inspiration from the seed—one of the smallest but most powerful mechanisms for change—From the Ground Up presents works by 17 contemporary artists who confront the specter of global environmental disaster and disruptions in food production. The artists also explore technology, histories of contested spaces, and Indigenous understandings of nature as they imagine alternative, sustainable futures and issue calls to action. The exhibition looks at the ways art and science can work together to encourage sustainable food and shelter using traditional environmental management techniques that stand in contrast to industrialized corporate farming.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2020); Implementation support: $180,000 (2023)

ArtCenter College of Design
Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art

We live in the age of Big Data: extremely large data sets collected from multiple sources by scientists, businesses, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and others. Data visualization—the practice of representing data—is one of the primary tools used to make these massive amounts of data understandable, transforming them into knowledge. Within the sciences, data visualization conveys information in a compelling manner; in art, it transforms information into a canvas for creative expression. Over the past 20 years, artists and designers have incorporated data visualization into their work, both as a way of critiquing it and as a new form of storytelling. Seeing the Unseeable explores how art, science, and design have become integrated in the work of both scientists and contemporary artists.

Exhibition research support: $110,000 (2021); Implementation support: $170,000 (2023)

Autry Museum of the American West (for two exhibitions)
Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology

Future Imaginaries explores the rising use of Futurism in contemporary Indigenous art as a means of enduring colonial trauma, creating alternative futures, and advocating for Indigenous technologies in a more inclusive present and sustainable future. More than 50 artworks are on display, some interspersed throughout the museum to create unexpected encounters and dialogues between contemporary Indigenous creations and historic Autry works. Artists such as Andy Everson, Ryan Singer, and Neil Ambrose Smith wittily upend pop-culture icons by Indigenizing sci-fi characters and storylines. Wendy Red Star places Indigenous people in surreal spacescapes wearing fantastical regalia, and Virgil Ortiz brings his own space odyssey, Revolt 1680 2180, to life in a new, site-specific installation. By intermingling science fiction, self-determination, and Indigenous technologies across a diverse array of Native cultures, Future Imaginaries envisions sovereign futures while countering historical myths and the ongoing impact of colonization, including environmental degradation and toxic stereotypes.

Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West

In the Western landscape, what we physically see and how that is visually represented doesn’t always align. Technologies originally designed to make places visible often became instruments of surveillance, severing Western lands from the populations that depended on them. To examine how visual technologies, artistic interventions, and the workings of state power have evolved in tandem with the Western landscape, Out of Site focuses on three technological revolutions: wet-plate photography, used to understand and explain geological processes; aerial photography and pattern recognition; and the increasing use of drones, satellites, and other long-range photographic technologies to image secretive sites, military installations, and other technologically-mediated locales. The exhibition features 80 artworks, archival materials, and devices ranging from mammoth-plate cameras to drones. Carleton Watkins’s Nevada mining photographs, 19th-century geological reports and stereoviews, and Margaret Bourke-White’s aerial surveys published in LIFE magazine in 1936 are juxtaposed with contemporary photographic and video pieces by Michael Light, David Maisel, Steven Yazzie, and other artists.

Exhibition research support: $175,000 (2020); Implementation support: $380,000 (2023)

The Broad
Social Forest: Oaks of Tovaangar

Artist and environmentalist Joseph Beuys’s artwork 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) began in Kassel, Germany, in 1982. The “action,” as Beuys called it, involved planting 7,000 trees in public spaces throughout the city over five years. Since then, Beuys’s vision has propagated to other cities around the world, with more modest tree-planting initiatives extending the project. The Broad—whose collection includes one of the world’s most complete groupings of Beuys’s limited-edition artworks—brings his concept to Los Angeles, combining this ecological artwork with programs that address issues of environmental justice and ecological reconciliation and restoration. To execute the planting of oaks and other trees in Los Angeles, The Broad has partnered with North East Trees—a community-based nonprofit—and the LA Public Library, which uses education kits developed with the help of the Gabrielino Tongva community to educate families about the importance of the California oak trees to the precolonial inhabitants of present-day Los Angeles. 7000 Oaks speaks to the worsening climate crisis, making Beuys’s project timelier than ever.

Exhibition research support: $90,000 (2020); Implementation support: $200,000 (2023)

California African American Museum
World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project

George Washington Carver was a pioneer of plant-based engineering and one of the nation’s earliest proponents of sustainable agriculture. In the early 1900s he built his “Jesup Wagon,” a moveable school, to share soil and plant samples, equipment, and other agricultural knowledge with farmers. Carver’s then-radical ideas—organic fertilizers, crop rotation, and plant-based medicines and construction materials—are now recognized as the forerunners of modern conservationism. A trained and practicing artist, Carver used sustainable materials such as peanut- and clay-derived dyes and paints in his many weavings and still-life paintings. World Without End showcases Carver’s rarely seen artworks alongside his laboratory equipment, paint samples, and formulas. The exhibition also features contemporary artists, scientists, and engineers working in dialogue with Carver and his interests in nature, biology, activism, and sustainability, among them Los Angeles-based assemblage artist Judson Powell, whose research into Carver inspired the exhibition. Both the exhibition and its catalogue include previously unpublished material documenting Carver’s life and work at Tuskegee University.

Exhibition research support: $120,000 (2020); Implementation support: $225,000 (2023)

California Institute of Technology
Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020

Crossing Over considers how scientists use visual culture, examining the roles images and artists have played in scientific institutions. Far from depicting information impartially, scientific images make arguments, persuading viewers to accept particular theories and interpretations. Caltech, founded in the late 19th century, serves as a case study for how scientific images have been used over the 20th and 21st centuries and how they’ve evolved. Spanning 100 years, two global pandemics, and four venues across campus, Crossing Over mines the Caltech archives for objects, images, and stories illustrating the complex interchange between science and the visual arts at this influential institution. Caltech physicist Richard Feynman, for example, created a widely used system for depicting the behavior of subatomic particles, known as Feynman diagrams. Three contemporary Los Angeles artists—Lita Albuquerque, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Hillary Mushkin—contribute original, site-specific installations.

Exhibition research support: $83,000 (2020); Implementation support: $225,000 (2023)

California State University Dominguez Hills University Art Gallery
Brackish Water Los Angeles

Inspired by the dynamic sites where fresh and ocean waters intermix, Brackish Water Los Angeles looks at the unique environments formed by the collision of water courses in the region, past and present. The exhibition is housed on the CSUDH campus in South Los Angeles, where local rivers have been transformed into concrete channels, and where industrial contamination and ecological racism have plagued surrounding communities for generations. Artifacts and artworks trace the intersections where ecology, culture, and community meet and uncover the complex ecosystems, infrastructures, and politics that both create and destroy brackish water habitats. Catherine Opie’s Freeways series draws parallels between the rivers and freeway systems as arteries of the region. Emma Robbins’s LA River Paper—made from materials the artist salvaged from the concrete river channel—demonstrates that the compromised urban waterway can still be useful and beautiful. Historic maps and images trace the river’s course and appearance pre-channelization, inviting visitors to imagine new possibilities for our landscape.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2020); Implementation support: $180,000 (2023)

Center for Land Use Interpretation
Remote Sensing: Explorations into the Art of Detection

Since World War II, the Los Angeles aerospace industry has been a leader in the development of remote sensing technologies—those that gather information without physical contact between the observer and the observed. Remote Sensing: Explorations into the Art of Detection investigates cultural and aesthetic responses to technologies that demonstrate an outsized but sometimes hidden impact on daily life, global conflict, and civil liberties. The exhibition spans two sites, the Center’s Los Angeles facility (CLUI LA) in downtown Culver City, and the Center’s Desert Research Station (DRS) in the Mojave Desert. The DRS serves as the remote location, operating in the arena of field research, test, and evaluation of remote sensing phenomenology, and includes creative and experimental R&D projects on its grounds. The Los Angeles location is the urban collection point, processing information and data from the field and interpreting it for the public.

Exhibition research support: $70,000 (2020); Implementation support: $160,000 (2023)

Craft Contemporary
Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design

Architects, designers, and scientists are looking to nature for sustainable design solutions that consume less material, generate less pollution, and use less energy. Nature Near: Material Experimentation in Architecture and Design is the first exhibition to explore the most promising and pragmatic building materials and technologies at the intersection of nature, science, and craft. The title references architect Richard Neutra’s posthumous book in which he advances his theory of “biorealism”: the role of the biological and behavioral sciences in architecture, and architecture’s essential relationship with the environment. Today this theory appears prescient given the emergence of biodesign. This field poses the possibility of constructing or even growing buildings with living and eco-friendly materials such as algae, microorganisms, and silkworms. At the same time, 3D printing, digital tools, and robotics are transforming the very concept of building, allowing us to reimagine the use of natural materials and to build with more precision and less waste. Nature Near presents these innovations through large-scale installations by artists, architects, and designers.

Exhibition research support: $73,000 (2020); Implementation support: $180,000 (2023)

Fathomers
Emergence: A Genealogy

The emerging field of synthetic biology, which involves redesigning organisms for useful purposes by engineering them to have new abilities, has the power to expansively transform modern life and confronts the innovative nature and wisdom of the “wise humans,” Homo sapiens. What forms of life will we choose to cultivate moving forward? What will we nurture, and what might we leave behind, whether by choice or by accident? Where does agency reside in this new moment of making, learning, and living with? Emergence: A Genealogy invites the public to explore these questions together and to be inspired by iconic bio artworks, new lab-based discoveries and design solutions, and the provocations of a range of wildly creative thinkers serving as guides. Organized across the themes “Being Born,” “Living,” and “Dying,” Emergence probes changing definitions of what is natural, synthetic, conscious, and essential to existence.

Exhibition research support: $115,000 (2020); Implementation support: $180,000 (2023)

Fowler Museum at UCLA
From Fire We Are Born

Fire has always been part of land management and cultural practices among Indigenous Californians. But the settlers who moved into the state associated fire with untamed wildfires and outlawed prescribed fires. From Fire We Are Born examines how three Southern California Indian communities—the Tongva, Ivilyuqaletem (Cahuilla), and Payómkawichum (Luiseño)—historically used fire to replenish the land and spur plant growth. The exhibition unites a wide range of Indigenous art objects embedded with traditional ecological knowledge about fire, including baskets, bark skirts, canoes, and more. It places these historical artifacts in dialogue with newly commissioned videos, sculptures, photographs, and installations by artists from those same Southern California communities who offer innovative ideas about the role fire might play in our collective future.

Exhibition research support: $220,000 (2023)

Fowler Museum at UCLA, in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara
Sangre de Nopal/Blood of the Nopal: Tanya Aguiñiga and Porfirio Gutiérrez in Conversation

Sangre de Nopal/Blood of the Nopal is a multi-exhibition project that examines the intersection of art and science within the Indigenous Oaxacan diaspora. The cultivation of cochineal—a red dye derived from an insect that lives on the opuntia (prickly pear) cactus—by the Zapotec peoples, and its use by contemporary artists, provide a case study in multi-generational innovation. At the Fowler Museum, two fiber artists who were part of the project’s interdisciplinary research team, Tanya Aguiñiga and Porfirio Gutiérrez, will be featured in an exhibition of new commissions and existing work, alongside Oaxacan textiles from the Fowler collection. This multivocal exhibition will center ancestral knowledge and technical experimentation, and also bring a special focus to immigration and labor justice. A companion exhibition will be presented at MCA Santa Barbara featuring the work of Aguiñiga, Gutiérrez, and other contemporary artists, and each exhibition will include a “lab” component, where the language of western science meets traditional ecological knowledge.

Exhibition research support: $145,000 (2023)

Fulcrum Arts, co-presented with Chapman University
Energy Fields: Vibrations of The Pacific

The Pacific Rim is a hotbed of cultural, military, electromagnetic, and seismic activity. Energy Fields: Vibrations of The Pacific examines approaches to vibration, sound, and kinetic energy shared by artists and scientists working in the Pacific region across the 20th century to the present day. An international group of contemporary artists demonstrates the ways energetic waves operate on the senses, and how these often invisible forces have been considered by artists and scientists. Artworks such as Alba Triana’s sound sculpture Music on a Bound String No. 2 (2015) and David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s Telepathy (2008)—a single-occupancy anechoic chamber—allow audiences to experience and contemplate their relationship to sound and vibration. Malena Szlam’s film ALTIPLANO creates visual rhythms against a soundscape generated from infrasound (below human hearing) recordings of volcanoes, geysers, and Chilean blue whales. Energy Fields also reflects on the contributions of Indigenous artists and traditional environmental knowledge across four continents connected by the Pacific Ocean.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2021); Implementation support: $200,000 (2023)

Griffith Observatory
Pacific Standard Universe

This 23-minute digital film explores the ways people have represented the cosmos across time and cultures. Traditional diagrams and models of the universe may have been rooted in astronomical observation, but they were intended as symbolic images of cosmic order rather than accurate pictures of the universe. In ancient cosmologies the universe changed slowly, or not at all. In scientific cosmology, change is continuous. Though we now examine and express cosmology primarily through mathematics, we still routinely describe and explain it through metaphor, analogy, animation, and illustration, just as our ancestors did. Pacific Standard Universe explores how cosmological symbols from ancient times (the Aztec Calendar Stone or the Chumash pictographs of the San Fernando Valley) and the imagery produced by the observatories and aerospace industry of California have transformed our perception of the universe. The film, which is related to the cosmology exhibition at LACMA, makes its debut at the observatory in 2024 and become part of its ongoing education program.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2022); Implementation support: $200,000 (2023)

Hammer Museum
Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice

The lungs of our planet—oceans, forests, and the atmosphere—are under threat, invaded by carbon emissions, plastics, and man-made pollutants. The act of breathing was rendered even more perilous by the COVID-19 pandemic and police brutality. Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice considers the connections between climate change, environmental justice, and social justice through the lens of contemporary art. The indoor/outdoor exhibition brings together approximately 35 works focused on climate change by a group of intergenerational contemporary artists, scientists, and activists, addressing anthropogenic disasters such as deforestation, ocean acidification, coral reef bleaching, water pollution, extraction, and atmospheric politics. Six major new commissions, including a bee sculpture by Garnett Puett and a living garden created by Ron Finley, go beyond the art world to make tangible contributions to the protection of our climate.

Exhibition research support: $215,000 (2020); Implementation support: $425,000 (2023)

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens (for two exhibitions)
Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis

Storm Cloud traces the rise of environmental awareness in the 19th century, an age of rapid industrialization in the English-speaking world as well as the period in which the sciences of geology, paleontology, meteorology, and ecology developed. The title comes from a lecture by the writer and art critic John Ruskin in which he described the changing appearance of the sky due to industrial pollution. British and American visual and literary artworks by the Romantics, the Pre-Raphaelites, and members of the Arts and Crafts movement are displayed alongside key scientific texts and images, such as works by early 20th-century preservationists John Muir and Mary Hunter Austin. The exhibition also documents water use and oil extraction in the Los Angeles region in the early 20th century. Through nearly 200 items drawn from The Huntington’s collections and on loan from collections in the US and Britain, Storm Cloud places our current climate crisis in its historical context, examining the profound changes industrialization and a globalized economy have wrought on everyday life, as charted by scientists, artists, and writers for over 150 years.

奪天工 Growing and Knowing in the Gardens of China

Growing and Knowing in the Gardens of China asks: What is a garden, and what can you do with one? Focusing on the gardens of China’s literati during the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1911), Growing and Knowing illuminates gardens as transformative spaces—spaces for growing and contemplating plants in order to better understand the world around us, as well as our place in it. The exhibition in the Studio for Lodging the Mind—a gallery within The Huntington’s Chinese Garden—brings together 30 hanging scrolls, hand scrolls, albums, and books from collections throughout the United States. The show continues outside the gallery’s walls with an experiential performance piece commissioned from Hong Kong–based artist Zheng Bo. Together, these artworks showcase Chinese gardens as sites in which scholars hybridized plants, domesticated wild flora, and observed trees and grasses to make sense of the patterns of the cosmos. Ultimately, Growing and Knowing seeks to spur visitors to embrace their own gardens as spaces that can delight the senses, nourish the body, and inspire the mind.

Exhibition research support: $275,000 (2020); Implementation support: $330,000 (2023)

Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Scientia Sexualis

Scientia Sexualis is a group survey of contemporary artists whose work confronts and reimagines sex and gender from the ways in which they have been historically defined by science. Over the past 50 years, feminist and queer artists have approached these subjects as sources of experimentation, knowledge production, medical management, and biotechnical information. The exhibition features artists who not only examine the difficult history of science as it relates to racialized and gendered assumptions about the sexual body, but who also work from its wake—creatively reclaiming scientific methods to produce speculative technologies of transformation, map embodied forms of knowledge, and radicalize practices of care. Through an intersectional and trans-inclusive perspective, Scientia Sexualis and its accompanying catalogue aim to explore and reconstruct the frameworks that determine not only what sex and gender are, but what a body is and can be.

Exhibition research support: $120,000 (2020); Implementation support: $225,000 (2023)

La Jolla Historical Society, with additional venues at California Center for the Arts Escondido, San Diego Public Library Gallery, and the Mandeville Art Gallery at UC San Diego
Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work

Husband and wife Newton and Helen Harrison were among the earliest and most notable ecological artists. This is the first exhibition to focus on their California work, nearly 20 projects produced between the late 1960s and 2000s. Responding to growing environmental awareness, the Harrisons pushed conceptual art in new directions, from their efforts to make topsoil—endangered in many places—to their transformation of a Pasadena debris basin into a recreational area. The couple agreed that they would only take on projects that benefited the ecosystem. Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work revisits the Harrisons’ groundbreaking ecological concepts through re-staged performance artworks, drawings, paintings, photography, collages, maps, archival documentation of large-scale installations, and unrealized proposals for real-world ecological solutions. The Lagoon Cycle—a complex 360° photo mural in 60 parts—on display for the first time since it was acquired by the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1997.

Exhibition research support: $100,000; Implementation support: $240,000 (2023)

LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Inc.)
Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics

(un)disciplinary tactics showcases the work of Beatriz da Costa (1974–2012) as an investigation into technoscientific experimentation, political activism, and art-making, contextualized for our contemporary moment. In the spirit of da Costa’s practice, the project weaves together an exhibition, publication, public programming, performances, educational workshops, and study groups to evoke the artist’s approach. Born in Germany, da Costa collaborated with artists, scientists, activists, and students from various technoscientific communities. While a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, she was deeply interested in the intersection of art and robotics. In 2003 she joined the faculty at UC Irvine’s innovative interdisciplinary Arts, Computation, Engineering (ACE) program. Da Costa died in 2012 after a long battle with cancer, leaving many of her artistic and intellectual projects unfinished. For (un)disciplinary tactics, LACE reactivates several of her projects, including her most famous collaboration: PigeonBlog, a community science project developed in collaboration with engineers, scientists, and pigeons to track air pollution data in California.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2020); Implementation support: $180,000 (2023)

LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) (for three exhibitions)
Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures

Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures, created by LACMA curators working with scientists at the Carnegie Observatories and the Griffith Observatory, presents a group of rare and visually stunning artworks from different cultures and time periods to explore the variety of human attempts to explain the universe’s origins, mechanics, and meaning. Nearly every ancient culture has seen the heavens as a mirror of cosmic structure and process, and ancient measurements of time were directly influenced by the movements of heavenly bodies. Mapping the Infinite reveals how, as religions evolved, cultures conceived of and depicted cosmic deities and concepts of time and space through works of art and sacred architecture. The exhibition illuminates this history of cosmologies around the globe from the Stone Age to the present, from Neolithic Europe to the present day and including Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, South and Southeast Asia, East Asia, the Islamic Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the Indigenous Americas, Northern Europe, and the United States.

We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art

Mesoamerican artists held a cosmic responsibility: as they adorned the surfaces of buildings, clay vessels, textiles, bark-paper pages, and sculptures with color, they quite literally made the world. The power of color emerged from the materiality of its pigments, the skilled hands that crafted it, and the communities whose knowledge imbued it with meaning. By engineering and deploying color, artists wielded the power of cosmic creation in their hands. We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art explores the science, art, and cosmology of color in Mesoamerica. Featuring more than 200 ancestral and contemporary Indigenous artworks, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue follow two interconnected lines of inquiry—technical and material analyses, and Indigenous conceptions of art and image—to reach the full richness of color at the core of Mesoamerican worldviews.

Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film

Over the last four decades, image-editing software has radically transformed our visual world. The ease with which images and text can be digitally generated and altered has enabled new forms of creative experimentation, while also sparking philosophical debates about the very nature of representation. Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film examines the impact of digital manipulation tools from the 1980s to the present, for the first time assessing simultaneous developments and debates in the fields of photography, graphic design, and visual effects. Featuring over 100 works, the exhibition traces the emergence of distinctive digital aesthetic strategies, relationships to realism, and storytelling modes. Whether using early paint programs, commercially packaged and open-source software, individually programmed tools, or AI image generators, the artists in Digital Witness illuminate the visual culture we now inhabit, in which “Photoshop” is not only a product but also a verb.

Exhibition research support: $335,000 (2020); Implementation support: $530,000 (2023)

LAXART
Life on Earth: Art and Ecofeminism

“Ecofeminism”—a theoretical and activist movement that connects gender oppression and the exploitation of natural resources—emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s from the environmental, anti-nuclear, queer, and feminist movements. Women artists became key proponents of this new movement, using art to address the systemic subjugation of women and nature, and the possibilities that feminism enables. Life on Earth: Art and Ecofeminism is a group exhibition inspired by four decades of ecofeminist art. Featuring approximately 35 international artists working in a variety of media, Life on Earth considers the origins and future of ecofeminist art, using it as both a lens and point of departure to explore themes of intersectional environmentalism, social ecologies, Indigenous rights, reproductive rights, and speculative futures, among other threads. By thoughtfully minimizing the show’s carbon footprint, Life on Earth’s organizers contribute to the ongoing expansion of the ecofeminist movement.

Implementation support: $200,000 (2023)

Library Foundation of Los Angeles and LA Public Library
No Prior Art

No Prior Art celebrates the basic nature of human creativity by exploring the process of invention as a key feature in artistic and scientific advances. Through a major exhibition at LAPL’s Central Library and a series of 50 free programs and participatory events at branch libraries in communities citywide, the project highlights how public libraries increasingly serve as dynamic sites of experimentation and creation, as well as hubs for curiosity. Inspired by and drawing from LAPL’s patent and intellectual property resources—the most extensive on the West Coast—No Prior Art features the work of more than a dozen artists and inventors, many with ties to Los Angeles. The project includes work from Mixografia, a multigenerational art studio that invented and patented a unique three-dimensional printmaking process; Pippa Garner, a trans artist whose outrageous inventions act as an exploration of the body and a critique of consumerism; and KAOS Network, an Afrofuturistic innovation lab in Leimert Park founded by artist/filmmaker Ben Caldwell.

Exhibition research support: $90,000 (2020); Implementation support: $275,000 (2023)

Los Angeles Filmforum
Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film

From its invention, the motion picture camera was understood as a technology for “objective” observation. Just as researchers enthusiastically adopted cinematic techniques such as time lapse, fast and slow motion, and microscopic photography to capture everything from plant growth to medical procedures, artists have been equally fascinated by film’s ability to record phenomena that the human eye cannot normally see. Experimentations examines how science, nature, and technology films shape our understanding of humans, nature, gender, knowledge, and progress. The multi-venue public screening series presents analog and digital time-based media incorporating diverse scientific and experimental film traditions from across the globe, including premieres of works never seen in the United States alongside better-known films screened in new contexts, repurposed scientific footage, and rarely -seen popular science and nature documentaries like Disney’s True-Life Adventures. Experimentations investigates how the relationship between science and film enlivens both disciplines while challenging presumptions of objectivity in the photographic image.

Exhibition research support: $85,000 (2020); Implementation support: $180,000 (2023)

Mingei International Museum
Blue Gold: The Art and Science of Indigo

Indigo—both a varied plant family that grows worldwide and the deep-blue dye it produces—has a long and multifaceted history of cultivation, production, and distribution. Blue Gold combines science, craft, and history to explore this color’s complex past and present. Indigo’s beauty and ubiquity have eclipsed the unpleasant realities of its growth and manufacture, including hard labor and pollution, and its association with colonialism and slavery. As a pigment, indigo has been assigned protective properties, healing powers, and dangerous qualities that have shaped its uses in crafts and the arts. The exhibition highlights the roles of botany, chemistry, medicine, ecology, and economics in indigo cultivation. Contemporary craftspeople and artists working with indigo, such as Porfirio Gutiérrez and Laura Kina, address questions about the sustainability of indigo, its problematic legacies, and technological alternatives to manual processing.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2020); Implementation support: $205,000 (2023)

MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art)
Olafur Eliasson

The interactive works of Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) encourage emotional and participatory responses to sustainability, climate change, and other complex issues. Through his multidisciplinary and collaborative studio practice, the artist combines natural elements such as light, water, and movement to engage and alter viewers’ senses. The centerpiece of MOCA’s exhibition is a newly commissioned, large-scale installation. An additional selection of works spans the artist’s 30-year career and traces his attention to climate issues, including his famed photographic The Glacier Melt Series (1999/2019) and The Green River Series (1998–2001). Visitors are invited to consider the climate crisis via immersive experiences that engage all their senses and guide them toward an embodied experience of the environment and a personal understanding of the global climate emergency. An education lab created in collaboration with the Getty Conservation Institute engages visitors in scientific and technical research into Eliasson’s work as a case study for the conservation of experiential art installations.

Exhibition research support: $175,000 (2020); Implementation support: $300,000 (2023)

MOLAA (Museum of Latin American Art)
ARTEONICA*: Art, Science, and Technology in Latin America Today

Brazilian art pioneer Waldemar Cordeiro was one of South America’s first computer artists. His treatise on arteônica—a compound of the words “art” and “electronic” and the title of an exhibition he organized in 1971—frames the computer as an instrument for positive societal change, one that could democratize art and culture. ARTEONICA* revisits this little-known Latin American art movement, creating a dialogue between a group of pioneering computer artists from the 1960s and 1970s and Latin American contemporary artists whose work responds to their legacy. Despite challenging political and social conflicts across Latin America in the ’60s and ’70s that isolated artists in the region, the relationships between art, science, and technology expanded during that period. ARTEONICA* explores past and present art from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Peru within a broader context of conceptual, historical, and geopolitical thought in Latin America.

Implementation support: $160,000 (2023)

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
For Dear Life: Art, Medicine and Disability

In the past decade, the art world has witnessed an explosion of artistic activity surrounding issues of illness, disability, caregiving, and the vulnerability of the human body. Set in motion by the emergence of movements for disability justice, this activity accelerated with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet since the 1960s, artists have negotiated and deflected the medical gaze, creating works that assert agency in the face of medicalizing labels and that highlight the role of care in producing new forms of community and healing. Increasingly, artists have come to locate illness and disability not in individual bodies, but as part of a web of interconnected societal, environmental, and historical conditions. For Dear Life is the first historical survey of artistic responses to sickness, health, and medicine broadly. The show is informed in part by MCASD’s position in San Diego County, a hub for health science research as well as biotech and pharmaceutical industries.

Exhibition research support: $120,000 (2020); Implementation support: $275,000 (2023)

Museum of Jurassic Technology
A Veiled Gazelle: Intimations of the Infinite and Eternal—Islamic Geometries of Medieval Al-Andalus

The Al-Andalus region, linking North Africa and Europe, was a meeting place for people and ideas in the medieval period. Its architectural legacy is distinguished by ceilings, floors, and walls intricately patterned with complex geometries that unite mathematics and aesthetics. A Veiled Gazelle uses experiential environments, three-dimensional films, and miniatures of sites from Spain and Morocco to teach visitors about the artistic and intellectual underpinnings of Islamic architecture. This immersive exhibition is conceived as a site for programming related to Islamic art, geometry, and science, including a stereoscopic film on the history and architecture of Al-Andalus. The gallery has been reimagined as an installation of two key Islamic architectural forms: muqarnas—plaster or ceramic honeycombed squinches, arches, vaults, and domes—and lacería, ceilings made of intricate latticed wood. Visitors learn about the geometric families central to Islamic design and discover how these beautiful and often confoundingly complex patterns have been created for more than a thousand years simply using a compass and straightedge.

Exhibition research support: $50,000 (2020); Implementation support: $160,000 (2023)

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Glendale Library, Arts & Culture, presented at Brand Library & Art Center
Blended Worlds: Experiments in Interplanetary Imagination

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a leader in the robotic exploration of the universe, and Glendale Library, Arts & Culture have organized Blended Worlds, an exhibition that showcases “objects from the future” created by a multidisciplinary team of artists, visual strategists, scientists, engineers, and data scientists brought together by JPL. The works invite us to think more expansively about new forms of connectedness among people, as well as between humans and non-human entities, and how those relationships might evolve to deepen our empathy and ability to solve problems. Public programming includes panel discussions and interactive experiences that help visitors engage with themes presented in the exhibition and facilitate conversations about the importance of connectedness to science, our own lives, and the future of humanity.

Implementation support: $200,000 (2023)

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (for two exhibitions)
Habitats: Rethinking a Century of Dioramas

The Natural History Museum’s historic diorama halls are the largest exhibitions at the museum, showcasing over 75 incredibly detailed habitats ranging from arctic tundra to tropical rainforest. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the dioramas, NHM is restoring and reopening a diorama hall that has been closed for decades. There, visitors experience immersive new installations that call attention to dioramas as a unique combination of art and science and explore biodiversity, ecology, conservation, colonialism, and changing museum display techniques. NHM maintains an active diorama program where staff continue to update and build dioramas, keeping this art form alive. Visitors can examine these illusions of wilderness through a series of displays, engaging programs, and a new book that sheds light on the previously untold history of NHM’s dioramas.

Excavations

During an extended residency at La Brea Tar Pits, contemporary artist Mark Dion assisted with excavations, cleaned fossils, shadowed a taxidermist, explored collections and archives, and interviewed curators, educators, and floor staff. His new installation at the Tar Pits, Excavations, deliberately evokes a behind-the-scenes space, displaying new work alongside early museum murals, dioramas, and maquettes of Ice Age mammals. Dion’s 10-foot-long sculpture of a fossilized pack rat skeleton stands atop a mix of natural and cultural detritus from the Tar Pits and the Hancock Park neighborhood. Pack rats’ dung and nests include organic material that can date back tens of thousands of years, making them valuable to scientists trying to understand past ecosystems. Additionally, six new drawings by Dion of mammal skeletons commonly found in the Tar Pits—artworks painstakingly labeled with the names of locally important scientists, artists, historical figures, and landmarks—further blend artifice and reality. A new field guide to Hancock Park highlights the flora and fauna of the area, as well as the Tar Pits’ cultural and scientific importance.

Exhibition research support: $180,000 (2020); Implementation support: $350,000 (2023)

Oceanside Museum of Art, with additional venues at Orange County Museum of Art and Crystal Cove Conservancy
Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean

Transformative Currents examines the historical causes and ongoing effects of the cultural and environmental devastation of the Pacific Ocean, and harnesses art’s potential to enact positive ecological change, both local and planetary. Covering nearly one-third of the Earth’s surface, the Pacific Ocean is home to thousands of interconnected peoples, species, and ecosystems—all under threat from climate change, industrial pollution, and overfishing. Works in diverse media by 20 contemporary artists are organized around the theme of ocean currents, which traverse the Pacific and suggest fluidity, interconnectivity, and collective responsibility. Each project addresses a specific issue affecting the coastal environment. Together, they highlight the interdependency of resources and the impact of local actions on global problems. At a time when the health of the Pacific Ocean is in a fragile state, Transformative Currents unites art, science, and Indigenous knowledge systems to raise awareness and improve coastal conditions.

Exhibition research support (to Orange County Museum of Art): $100,000 (2020); Implementation support: $240,000 (2023)

ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, presented at the USC Fisher Museum of Art
Sexual Science and the Imagi-nation

Sexual Science and the Imagi-nation considers the importance of science fiction fandom and occult interests to LGBTQ history. Science fiction and occult communities helped pave the way for the LGBTQ movement by providing a place for individuals to meet and imagine spaces less restricted by societal norms. The exhibition focuses on Los Angeles from the late 1930s through 1960s and looks both forward and backward to follow the lives of writers, publishers, and early sci-fi enthusiasts, including progressive communities such as the LA Science Fantasy Society, the Ordo Templi Orientis at the Agape Lodge, and ONE Inc. Spanning fandom, aerospace research, queer history, and the occult, Sexual Science and the Imagi-nation reveals how artists, scientists, and visionary thinkers like Kenneth Anger, Lisa Ben, Margaret Brundage, Marjorie Cameron, Morris Scott Dollens, Renate Druks, Curtis Harrington, and Jim Kepner worked together to envision and create a world of their own making through films, photographs, music, illustrations, costumes, and writing. Programming includes film screenings, panel discussions, and a Halloween cosplay event.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2020); Implementation support: $200,000 (2023)

OXY ARTS
Invisibility: Powers and Perils

Invisibility presents a historically and culturally wide-ranging selection of interventions—by artists, scientists, and activists—exploring the aesthetic politics of invisibility. Marginalized populations have long borne the effects of both invisibility and hyper-visibility—through racial profiling, surveillance, and housing insecurity—and increasingly so in our digital age. For centuries, invisibility has also been mobilized as a tactic of political resistance. The politics of the invisible also characterizes the tragic ecocide that humanity is perpetrating on our planet; even as we finally begin to acknowledge the reality and consequences of climate change, the stubborn invisibility of its causes and temporality remain a constant challenge. Such invisibility demands that we think beyond what we currently know, just as science does when it confronts fundamentally inscrutable phenomena such as black holes.

Exhibition research support (to Skirball Cultural Center): $90,000 (2020); Implementation support: $194,000 (2023)

Palm Springs Art Museum
Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945 to 1980

Particles and Waves examines how modern physics impacted the development of abstract art in postwar Southern California, from Man Ray’s paintings of mathematical models to Lee Mullican’s computer-inspired abstractions. In the 1920s scientists at Caltech, JPL, and Mount Wilson Observatory performed groundbreaking research in astronomy and particle physics. During and after World War II, the region remained at the forefront of scientific inquiry in theoretical physics and its applications in aerospace, industrial manufacturing, and communications technologies. Between 1945 and 1980, Los Angeles artists engaged deeply with these scientific ideas, mathematical theories, materials, and processes. The West Coast Minimalists and Light and Space artists—including Mary Corse, Fred Eversley, and James Turrell—made rigorous artistic and scientific studies of light and energy. Bettina Brendel and Helen Lundeberg explored issues of scale through their paintings of subatomic and astronomical subjects. Particles and Waves unites several generations of artists working in diverse materials and styles to visualize light, energy, motion, and time.

Exhibition research support (to Laguna Art Museum): $100,000 (2020); Implementation support: $240,000 (2023)

REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater)
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

In 1967, Caltech poet-in-residence Richard Brautigan imagined a coming future “where mammals and computers/ live together in mutually / programming harmony.” Borrowing its title from Brautigan’s poem, the exhibition All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace addresses one of the most pressing issues of our time—the impact of artificial intelligence—by proposing alternative directions for its future and the definition of what it means to be human. Presenting a broad range of multidisciplinary art forms, including visual art and performance, the project looks to new models of AI proposed by BIPOC, feminist, non-western, and non-binary systems of thought. How can these innovative and diverse conceptions of technology and intelligence reclaim AI’s potential? All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace expands public understanding of artificial intelligence by delving into the pressing questions it presents across underrepresented communities, exploring how technology alters the understanding of the human and nonhuman connection, and investigating its potential as a liberative tool.

Exhibition research support: $160,000 (2020); Implementation support: $200,000 (2023)

The San Diego Museum of Art
Wonders of Creation: Art, Science, and Innovation in the Islamic World

Wonders of Creation investigates intersections of art and science in Islamic intellectual and visual culture from the 7th century to the present day through the lens of wonder as defined by a celebrated 13th-century Islamic illustrated encyclopedia. Written in Arabic and Persian by the scholar Zakariyya al-Qazwini (d. 1283), The Wonders of Creation and Rarities of Existence is, simply put, a description of the universe, beginning with the stars and heavens, traveling across the Earth, and concluding with humanity and crafts and traditions. Wonders of Creation includes over 100 works—illustrated manuscripts and paintings, maps, scientific instruments, magic bowls, luster dishes, and architectural elements—to evoke a visual journey inspired by Qazwini’s text. Contemporary art, including two commissions by Ala Ebtekar and Hayv Kahraman and a collaboration with San Diego’s Balboa Art Conservation Center, brings the spirit of wonder and human curiosity into the present day.

Exhibition research support: $120,000 (2020); Implementation support: $275,000 (2023)

SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture)
Views of Planet City

Is it possible to design a socially and environmentally sustainable city for seven billion people? Views of Planet City imagines what the world might look like if humanity were to reverse the urban sprawl, and its entire human population were to be housed inside a single, hyperdense megalopolis. Drawing on the ideas of pioneering scientists and futurists and projecting on the basis of already gestating technologies, Views of Planet City challenges dystopian visions of the cities of tomorrow and offers an alternative vision: a scenario in which urbanization at a planetary scale is not incompatible with the safeguarding of Earth’s biodiversity. The project sheds light on various aspects of the Planet City hypothesis through presentations of speculative design, design fiction, and simulation.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2020); Implementation support: $225,000 (2023)

Self-Help Graphics & Art, presented at the Luckman Gallery at Cal State LA
Sinks: Places We Call Home

Communities of color are often the populations most vulnerable to the toxic effects of industrial waste and soil contamination. Sinks: Places We Call Home highlights the environmental disparities created by manufacturing sites in two communities located near Self Help Graphics: Exide battery plant in Vernon and the former Athens Tank Farm (Exxon Mobil) site in Willowbrook. Los Angeles-based artists Maru García and Beatriz Jaramillo are conducting data-driven research that reveals the harmful practices of the past and present and their long-term impact on people and the environment. Producing new work for the exhibition, García partnered with the Natural History Museum to pursue soil testing and lead reduction studies with community scientists in the areas surrounding Vernon. Jaramillo has invited voices from the Willowbrook communities, including the neighborhood’s Community Garden, into the exhibition through a collaborative installation. Sinks seeks to elevate the voices and stories of the people from these neighborhoods, to inform audiences about land contamination, and to work toward alternative solutions.

Exhibition research support: $110,000 (2020); Implementation support: $190,000 (2023)

UCI Beall Center for Art + Technology
Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty

Evolutionary biology, meteorology, neuroscience, and robotics are just a few examples of the complex systems that artists engage with in the exhibition Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty. Complex systems are dynamic, uncertain, and unpredictable. They are characterized by chaos, feed-back loops, self-organization, and emergent behavior. Future Tense features both emerging and established contemporary artists who utilize the concepts of complex systems in traditional media and new technologies such as computer modeling, robotics, and data visualizations. The exhibition includes work by Ralf Baecker, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Julie Mehretu, Clare Rojas, and Theresa Schubert, as well as new works by Newton Harrison, Chico MacMurtrie, Lucy HG Solomon & Cesar Baio collective, among others commissioned through the Beall Center’s Black Box Projects artist residency program. Exploring complex systems at various levels, from microscopic organisms to the totalizing implications of global warming on a planetary scale, the goal of Future Tense is for audiences to understand how complexity functions within individual works of art while also appreciating the beauty, intricacy, and wonder of each complex system.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2020); Implementation support: $200,000 (2023)

UCLA Art | Sci Center
Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption

If the scale and complexity of climate change exceeds the limits of human perception, how can artists represent it? Atmosphere of Sound examines how sound-based artists, responding to the climate crisis, have found a unique point of entry to this representational challenge. Sound art, as a medium, evades and challenges the certainty often associated with the sense of sight. The inherent ambiguities of sound can help audiences understand the rapidly shifting state of the climate and its effects on the physical world. Immersive, interactive installations, live performances, and videos by 13 artists—including Bill Fontana’s site-specific installation Silent Echoes - Notre Dame; Katie Grinnan’s sound sculptures; Iman Person’s Wanderlust, one of several on-campus sound walks; and performances by artists such as Patricia Cadavid, Amber Stucke, and Nina Waisman—activates the campus environment to engage audiences in deep reflection on the climate crisis.

Exhibition research support: $90,000 (2020); Implementation support: $170,000 (2023)

UCLA Arts Conditional Studio, presented at Human Resources
Art and the Internet in LA

In the past 50 years, the internet has grown from a military research project to the ubiquitous information backbone of our world. Even as the early web took off, few pundits would have predicted exactly how tightly woven into our lives the internet would become. Art and the Internet in LA invites a roster of contemporary artists living and working in LA to respond to the 50-year history of artists creating work on and with the internet, often shaping it through their interventions. The utopian ideas and art of the early internet have been lost to cynicism, financialization, and exploitation. Public discussions re-examine this history and open new futures by creating accessible online content, exploring digital privacy, measuring and mitigating the energy and environmental costs of the web, and creating local networks for communities without internet access.

Exhibition research support: $110,000 (2020); Implementation support: $170,000 (2023)

UCLA Film & Television Archive in partnership with UCLA Cinema & Media Studies Program
Science Fiction Against the Margins

Science Fiction Against the Margins explores what happens when the science fiction genre extends outside of Hollywood and into independent and international filmmaking productions that illuminate cultural difference, political injustice, and social inequality. Sci-fi films are typically dominated by Hollywood’s action-driven melodramas and state-of-the-art spectacles featuring a heteronormative star who will restore social order, whether on Earth or in space. Science Fiction Against the Margins challenges these conventions by considering how filmmakers have repurposed established tropes to privilege alternative representations of race and ethnicity, gender politics, and national identity. The 12-week film series brings together films, narrative shorts, and television programs from around the globe, complemented by conversations and Q&As with filmmakers, academics, and critics. Highlights include Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (US/Mexico, 2008), Nuotama Bodomo’s Afronauts (US, 2014), and the work of Palestinian video artist Larissa Sansour.

Exhibition research support: $120,000 (2020); Implementation support: $220,000 (2023)

UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside
Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World

Digital imaging was largely invented and developed in the research labs of Southern California during the Cold War and Space Race of the 1960s. Though digital imaging has become part of everyday life and popular culture, Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World is the first exhibition about the beginnings of this technology. Through photography, video, key archival documents, and historical equipment, the exhibition explores the history of digital imaging over six decades, from 1962 to the present. Digital Capture offers visitors a rare opportunity to interact with early digital technologies, original software, and now-obsolete hardware. Works by 42 artists trace the ideological shifts that took place as digital technologies were adopted for artistic ends, including a new AI installation by Refik Anadol that uses the California Museum of Photography’s Keystone-Mast collection of stereoscopic photographs as its image base, and a website created by Los Angeles-based artist Peter Wu+ that functions as both an artwork within the exhibition and an online extension of it.

Exhibition research support: $110,000 (2020); Implementation support: $225,000 (2023)

UC San Diego Visual Arts in partnership with Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Embodied Pacific

Embodied Pacific, a collaboration between UC San Diego’s Department of Visual Arts and Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, features 18 artworks created by artists in partnership with scientists from Scripps and laboratories across UC San Diego. The exhibition spans three sites on the UC San Diego campus including Birch Aquarium, as well as Kosay Kumeyaay Market, an Indigenous-run arts center located in Old Town San Diego. In a time of planetary crisis, the exhibition examines the intersection of oceanography and Indigenous knowledge and objects — such as Kumeyaay basket-making and full-sized tule reed boats—and imagines an intercultural approach to sustaining our oceans. Reaching audiences across San Diego and La Jolla, Embodied Pacific helps our community imagine a collective intercultural role in sustaining our ocean body in a time of critical change.

Exhibition research support: $120,000 (2020); Implementation support: $225,000 (2023)

Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College
We Place Life at the Center / Situamos La Vida en El Centro

Featuring Los Angeles-based Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo, We Place Life at the Center / Situamos La Vida en El Centro is an exhibition, publication, and pedagogical platform that directs dialogue and points of exchange among art, science, and environmental justice in the Americas. Caycedo’s multi-disciplinary practice engages with water and land stewardship, food sovereignty, and fair energy transition using Indigenous and eco-feminist frameworks. The exhibition assembles artworks by Caycedo and collaborators from across the Western Hemisphere, encompassing drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, performance, and socially engaged and community artworks, while also highlighting the ecological movements and processes that have informed them. Complementing the exhibition are extensive educational programs and partnerships, including an international convening of community scientists and grassroots environmental leaders, and a research practicum for Art and STEM students at East Los Angeles College.

Exhibition research support: $110,000 (2020); Implementation support: $225,000 (2023)

The Wende Museum
Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency

Sophisticated surveillance technologies are ubiquitous today, but the concerns they raise about privacy and government control are not new. Counter/Surveillance traces the historical roots of modern surveillance devices, the Cold War dynamics that shaped and spread them, and the ways artists have reclaimed agency by critically and creatively responding to—or evading—these technologies. In the 19th century, French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon pioneered identification techniques that prefigured the proto-biometric methods of the Cold War: facial recognition, forensic portraiture, and fingerprinting. Innovative surveillance devices such as miniature cameras and bugs were the stuff of real-life espionage dramas; and by the early 1960s facial recognition was computerized. Along with activists and dissidents, many of those surveilled were artists who then developed creative responses to authoritarian oversight. The exhibition presents an overview of Cold War-era surveillance practices using historical artifacts and artworks from the Wende Museum and other collections, including facial recognition training materials used by East German border guards in the 1970s and 1980s.

Exhibition research support: $100,000 (2020); Implementation support: $200,000 (2023)

---

Public Programming and Community Hubs

CaltechLive, Public Programming
Opening Doors

To illuminate the profound interdependencies between the sciences and the arts, Caltech will offer a program of dance, music, and theater complementing the institution’s PST ART exhibition, Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020. The program will showcase artists whose work engages with both the history of science and cutting-edge scientific research. Featured programming will include LA-based Invertigo Dance Theater, directed by Laura Karlin as well as Taiwan-based dancer/choreographer Huang Yi and his company, which includes an industrial robot, Kuka. Local choral ensemble Tonality, directed by founder Alexander Blake will perform a program addressing climate change. An original play by Dan Duling and directed by Michael Arabian will bring to life the relationships between Nikola Tesla and other prominent 20th-century inventors. Post-show talks will feature artists and scientists from the Caltech community and beyond discussing their creative processes. In a stand-alone panel, scientists and artists will share how they have benefitted from embracing “failure” as part of their process.

Grant support: $175,000 (2023)

Clockshop, Public Programming
What Water Wants

How can we reimagine our relationship to water in Los Angeles? This is one of the most pressing questions of our climate future. Clockshop, an arts nonprofit based in Elysian Valley, will present What Water Wants, a series of educational events and workshops complemented by a temporary commission from LA-based artist Rosten Woo. This initiative aims to engage communities along the river in Northeast LA to foster an understanding of human/water interactions in their own backyards from parking lots to wetlands. The program series is in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy and California State Parks as part of the Bowtie Wetlands Demonstration Project, a two-acre stormwater filtration and habitat restoration project along the banks of the LA River and places this site in the wider context of impermeability, seepage, flows, and climate politics of the region. Programs will include ecological restoration, art workshops, and artist-led nature experiences to empower communities with advocacy tools around climate-resilient green infrastructure, inspire them through art, and equip them for a shared stewardship of LA's water future.

Grant support: $75,000 (2023)

Crenshaw Dairy Mart, Public Programming
Free the Land! Free the People! A Study of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart abolitionist pod

Through the healing powers of the arts, the Crenshaw Dairy Mart (CDM) addresses poverty, economic injustice, and prison abolition in Los Angeles County. In 2021, CDM began prototyping and building abolitionist pods - autonomously irrigated, solar-powered gardens within geodesic domes - with communities impacted by food insecurity, housing insecurity, and the prison industrial complex. Offered alongside workshops on food justice, art, and healing justice, CDM's abolitionist pod project reimagines community care and models how art and science can collectively address social issues. CDM’s programming will accompany an exhibition about the abolitionist pod project and its evolution across Los Angeles County. Events will include health and wellness workshops using herbs and flowers, organic gardening and micro-farming workshops, a community farmers market, and a Black farmers’ meet-ups.

Grant support: $60,000 (2023)

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, Public Programming
Youth Summit on Sustainability

The Huntington Youth Summit on Sustainability will leverage the themes explored in the upcoming exhibition Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis at The Huntington, also part of Art and Science Collide. The summit will take place in fall 2024, engaging high school students in a dialog focused on youth-driven solutions to the climate crisis. The planning of this large-scale event will involve The Huntington, other local museum partners, and, most critically, young people deeply engaged with climate and environmental issues. They will be invited to design a summit that will empower its participants to enact independent sustainability initiatives in their communities. Following their independent projects during PST ART, summit participants will reconvene to share ideas, engender leadership, and inspire their generation to become active agents of change in the fight against climate change and in pursuit of a more sustainable future.

Grant support: $75,000 (2023)

Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Community Hub
Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees

The iconic Joshua tree—and the Mojave Desert ecosystems that support it—are threatened today by climate change, development, commercial wind and solar farms, and wildfires. The Lancaster Museum of Art and History (MOAH) will bring together artists and scientists as well as historians, Indigenous scholars, conservationists, policy makers, and creative writers focused on the plight of Joshua trees to engage in independent and collaborative problem-solving. The Community Hub programming will accompany a multidisciplinary exhibition at MOAH and will range from youth art workshops on regional flora and fauna to walk-and-talk hikes with naturalists, guided meditations, and a concert of California composer Gabriella Smith’s original music inspired by Joshua trees.

Grant support: $125,000 (2023)

LA Commons, Community Hub
We Are the Harvest

LA Commons will organize a series of dynamic programs titled We Are the Harvest, working in concert with partner organizations in neighborhoods across South LA, including Willowbrook, Leimert Park and Historic South Central. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the lack of access to food—especially healthy food—in South LA. Therefore, We Are the Harvest will integrate agricultural arts and sciences with community gardens, urban farms, and local activism concerning food insecurity and environmental justice. The project will include an artist-designed interactive map that will connect the stories and civic activism of South LA urban farms, and it will culminate in community events across the region, highlighting local food vendors, artists, and cultural bearers.

Grant support: $230,000 (2023)

L.A. Dance Project, Public Programming
RESONANCE

In this multi-part program from L.A. Dance Project (LADP), artists and scientists explore how dance can use the science of empathy to create choreographic works that encourage public dialogue, promote self-reflection, and mobilize civic action. A scientist who researches empathy and four Los Angeles-based choreographers of varying backgrounds, practices, and identities will collaborate on two new dance works for LADP’s company. The new works will be staged twice, in two different locations around LA, with each performance followed by a conversation, reflection, and call to action bringing together the scientist, choreographers, local community-based organizations, and the public. Audio description and other inclusive practices will be integrated into the choreographic works to make the programs as accessible as possible.

Grant support: $125,000 (2023)

LA Phil, in partnership with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Public Programming
Noon to Midnight

On November 16, 2024, the LA Phil will present Noon to Midnight, a 12-hour festival at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Live performances and sound-based installations will fill the entire Walt Disney Concert Hall campus, highlighting groundbreaking new music by artists from Los Angeles and around the world, with a major performance by the LA Phil New Music Group and the Los Angeles Master Chorale as a centerpiece, alongside works performed live by a host of Los Angeles-based ensembles and solo artists. This edition of Noon to Midnight will explore the intersections of art, technology, and nature through the theme of field recordings, audio captured outside of a studio. In addition to performances featuring work from composers of many generations, from emerging artists to the pioneers who first brought field recording into the sphere of live music, the festival will invite audiences to explore the theme through installations and media works tapping into an area of wildlife research called “bioacoustics,” ambient works using pre-recorded sound, GPS-enabled soundwalks, and opportunities for all-ages learning led by LA Phil’s Insight program.

Grant support: $225,000 (2023)

LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, Community Hub

Already a well-established museum and center for Latinx art, culture, and history, LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes will strengthen its existing partnerships with community organizations throughout Los Angeles County by designing and implementing a PST ART Community Hub focused on creating sustainable futures for Los Angeles. LA Plaza’s regularly programmed Family Days will provide a platform for the work of several partner organizations through workshops, performances, speakers, and hands-on art, science, culinary, garden activations, and unique participatory experiences.

Grant support: $225,000 (2022)

LACMA Art + Technology Lab, Public Programming
The Monophobic Response

The Art + Technology Lab at LACMA will produce The Monophobic Response by American Artist, an interdisciplinary artist whose sculptures, software, and video mine the history of technology, race, and knowledge production. With this project, the artist reimagines the field of rocket science to foreground the ideas of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Altadena, CA) and their own roots in America’s Second Great Migration. The performance stages a rocket test, performed by members of the fictional Earthseed community, drawn from Butler’s Parable series. After a dystopian reality has set across a future California, these community members, who aspire to “take root among the stars”, must begin somewhere with their rocket aspirations. In a strange parallel of events, their early rocket test resembles a historic rocket motor test conducted by a group of Caltech graduate students and collaborators who, 100 years prior, ventured into Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco to try out a rocket engine, an event that would give rise to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. American Artist’s test will take place in the Mojave Desert with an accurate replica of the original rocket engine. The Monophobic Response explores connections between Butler’s life and work, rocket science, and sci-fi in Los Angeles; the migration of African-diasporic families from the South to the West; and the societal impacts of today’s private space race. Video of the performance will be presented at a large public event in Los Angeles with an interdisciplinary panel conversation. This project is made possible in part by Hyundai Motor as an extension of The Hyundai Project: Art+Technology at LACMA, a long-term joint initiative exploring the convergence of art and technology.

Grant support: $100,000 (2023)

The Music Center, Public Programming
The Gift

The Gift is an immersive experience for all ages that explores what we can learn about ourselves—and each other—by observing the stars. Participants will gather at reading tables on Jerry Moss Plaza at The Music Center in Downtown Los Angeles, enveloped in an original orchestral score. There, they will encounter an illustrated book that conveys the story of two stars whose fates are intertwined; one of these stars will, at the end of its life, give over its matter—everything it has, everything it is—to its companion. A special preview of The Gift for young audiences will be presented inside the 100-inch telescope dome at the Mount Wilson Observatory.

Grant support: $150,000 (2023)

The New Children’s Museum, Public Programming
Science Fiction Creates the Future

Inspired by the life and work of author Octavia E. Butler, The New Children’s Museum (NCM) is embarking on a two-year exploration of science fiction. Their galleries will feature large-scale installations and artist projects led by the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, Cannupa Hanska Luger, and Saya Woolfalk. Programming for PST ART will include author readings, community partnerships, and intergenerational activities. Free family workshops will draw on Butler’s interests and themes, which included Indigenous plant identification and cultivation, map-reading, weaving, and astronomy. Working with a diverse roster of partners, NCM will develop original programming for children, teens, adults, and educators, with an emphasis on hands-on creation and making. Aside from its “Mass Creativity” program—a longstanding artmaking and community-building workshop held at multiple sites throughout San Diego County—all programs will be presented at the NCM.

Grant support: $75,000 (2023)

REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater) and CAP UCLA: UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, Public Programming
Live night: cruising bodies, spirits and machines

REDCAT and CAP UCLA present a celebratory night at The Theatre at the Ace Hotel, an invitation to cruising a living body inhabited by life experimental performances, machines and Djs, coded in trans migrant and ancestral futures.

Grant support: $170,000 (2023)

Skirball Cultural Center, Public Programming
UNSCORCHING THE EARTH: Repair through Intersectional Climate Activism

In January 2025 the Skirball Cultural Center will host an afternoon of talks, panels, and poetry highlighting the work of a diverse group of young climate activists and creative artists applying “heart and head” to “repair the world,” as directed in ancient Jewish texts. The speakers will share insights and strategies to achieve climate justice and reverse the devastating effects of climate change. The event is intended to incite intergenerational action and build sustainable communities, both in Los Angeles and globally. The program will amplify the vision of the artists who created the exhibition Trees, Time, and Technology: Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology, which participants will tour as part of the event.

Grant support: $45,000 (2023)

USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Public Programming
Quantum Vibrations

Quantum Vibrations is a free, four-part music series organized by Professor and Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication, Vice Provost for the Arts and 2016 MacArthur Fellow Josh Kun will explore the intersections of art and science through music and sound. Borrowing its title from legendary composer and music theorist Pauline Oliveros’ idea of “quantum listening,” or “listening in order to attune to our bodies, the earth and one another in an increasingly loud and noisy world,” the series engages with artists who consider music in scientific contexts and use music to explore scientific questions. It will include musical meditations on nuclear research, desert biomes, speculative world making, and non-human music makers.

Grant support: $225,000 (2023)

---

Non-grant-supported Exhibitions

The following Art & Science Collide exhibitions are not funded by Getty grants.

The Getty Center
Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography

Abstract imagery made with experimental light exposures was of great interest to avant-garde photographers from the 1920s to the 1950s. This exhibition features photographs 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 demonstrates the dynamic interplay between still photography, experimental film, and the dazzling time-based artworks by Thomas Wilfred called “Lumia instruments.”

Alta / a Human Atlas of Los Angeles

Alta / a Human Atlas of Los Angeles is a social impact project by Marcus Lyon, in collaboration with the Getty Conservation Institute, that showcases 100 extraordinary people creating positive change across Los Angeles County. Each participant is photographed and interviewed by Lyon and also contributes a sample of their ancestral DNA. The photographic portrait, DNA profile, and interview reveal the contexts of how their lives intersect with LA history and aim to preserve these multivocal narratives for future generations. The project is shared in several formats, including exhibitions within the participants’ own communities, outdoor projections, a website, and a book. Accompanying these is a mobile app that allows users to scan each participant’s portrait to listen to excerpts from their oral histories. Participants were identified by peers from diverse organizations across LA, and the project builds on previous Human Atlas projects by Lyon such as i.Detroit, WE: deutschland, and Somos Brasil.

Drawing with Light

Artists have explored the interaction of paper and light for centuries. This exhibition of drawings charts some of the innovative ways in which the two media were creatively used together. Works include the Getty 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 more contemporary artists including Vija Celmins join sheets by Delacroix, Manet, Seurat, and Tiepolo to portray the themes of translucency and the representation of light.

Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)

Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) will tell the story of a unique mid-20th-century collaboration between artists and engineers. In 1966 Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, engineers at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, teamed up with American artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman to form a new non-profit organization, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). E.A.T.’s debut event, 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, integrated art, theater, and groundbreaking technology at the Armory in Manhattan and served as a launchpad for artistic experimentation. Its second major event, the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion in Osaka, Japan (1970), presented a multi-sensory environment for the first international exposition ever held in Asia. Throughout, E.A.T. spawned collaborations among artists and engineers that had a significant impact on the interplay between art and science in the period. This exhibition will deepen our understanding of multi-media art in the 1960s and 70s. In addition, it will examine the ways in which E.A.T. pushed the role of the artist beyond the art world by exploring potential opportunities for art within the community as well as in cross-cultural communication and the environment. In pursuing these projects, E.A.T. stood 60 years ahead of its time.

Lumen: The Art & Science of Light

Contemporary society separates science and spirituality, but in the medieval world the science of light was harnessed by artists and scholars to better perceive and understand the sacred. Focusing on western European art, this major exhibition demonstrates how the study of light, vision, and the movement of the heavens were explored by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim theologians during the “Long Middle Ages” (800–1600). Featuring glimmering golden reliquaries, illuminated manuscripts, rock crystal vessels, and scientific instruments, the exhibition reveals how optics, geometry, and astronomy impacted art and religious language of the period. To convey the sense of wonder created by moving light on precious materials, a select number of contemporary artworks are placed in dialogue with historic objects.

Magnified Wonders: An 18th-Century Microscope

The spectacular French microscope from Getty’s collection is a unique testament to scientific advances and Rococo design in the Age of Enlightenment. It allowed science enthusiasts to immerse themselves in the recently discovered world of the microscopically small. New study and conservation reveal the cultural and historical context of this magnificent object and its technical complexity in a display that includes its lavish tooled-leather case and specimen slides of natural curiosities.

Rising Signs: The Medieval Science of Astrology

Medieval Europeans believed that the movements of the sun, moon, stars, and planets directly affected their lives on Earth. The position of these celestial bodies had the power to not only influence individual personalities, but also created 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, this exhibition reveals the mysteries of medieval astrology as it intersected with medicine, divination, and daily life in the Middle Ages.

Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography

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: Louise Bourgeois, Ed Ruscha, and others were invited by the C Project to explore the creative potential of the medium in the late 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.

Ultra-Violet: New Light on Van Gogh’s Irises

Examine Getty’s much-loved painting, Irises, by Vincent van Gogh, from the perspective of modern conservation science. This exhibition shows how Van Gogh’s understanding of light and color informed his painting practice and allows visitors to explore how conservators and scientists working together can harness the power of light with analytical tools to uncover the artist’s materials and working methods. The exhibition also reveals how light has irrevocably changed some of the colors in Irises. A painting we thought we knew so well suddenly becomes quite unfamiliar.

LACMA Charles White Elementary School Gallery
Nature on Notice: Contemporary Art and Ecology

Nature on Notice aims to illuminate the need for both artistic and scientific imagination to counter the threats to our ecology. Using a variety of conceptual approaches, more than 20 makers, both local and global, speak sensitively to the changes they are witnessing and their effects. As a counterpoint, other works in the exhibition make reference to cultures that have long revered nature, while most of the world has steadily consumed it. Fall 2024 (exact dates forthcoming)

MOAH (Lancaster Museum of Art and History)
Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees

Desert Forest focuses on the plight of the iconic Joshua tree and the vital and sensitive Mojave Desert ecosystem that supports it. The tree’s survival is threatened by climate change as well as development, wind and solar energy industries, and wildfires. In August 2020, a lightning strike ignited a fire that destroyed more than 1.3 million trees, prompting the California Fish and Game Commission to consider granting western Joshua trees protection under the California Endangered Species Act. This multidisciplinary project brings together natural history, Indigenous knowledge, public policy, conservation science, and creative works by historic and contemporary artists to spotlight the threatened tree and preservation efforts around it. From the first known photograph of a Joshua tree by Carleton Watkins to recent photographs by Cara Romero, the exhibition brings attention to the Joshua tree, current pressures on its fragile desert ecosystem, and its future viability.

Skirball Cultural Center
Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time, and Technology

As we confront escalating environmental concerns and pervasive societal inequities, trees remind us of the interconnectedness of our histories, our landscapes, and our collective futures. Artists Ken Goldberg and Tiffany Shlain will create an interactive, multi-sensory art installation that draws inspiration from the landscape of Los Angeles, the science of tree dating (dendrochronology), artificial intelligence, and Jewish thought, from the Tree of Knowledge to the holiday of Tu B’Shevat, the “New Year of the Trees.” The exhibition will feature a large-scale video “portrait” of Los Angeles analyzing images of the tree canopy alongside census data, full-sized cross-sections of salvaged trees etched with evocative timelines inspired by LA history, and personal “tributes” to specific LA trees created by the public using custom AI software. The exhibition will be accompanied by related programming created in collaboration with the artists, local communities, and ecological organizations.