In Their Own Words

In 1978, artist Lita Albuquerque used the LA coastline as a canvas.

She dug a 41-foot-long shallow trench on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and filled it with a brilliant powdered ultramarine pigment, creating a mark that appeared to continue into the horizon. Titled Malibu Line, the work gained renown in the contemporary art scene for drawing the viewer’s attention to the earth and sky in a visually concise and compelling way.

Two years later, overgrown with flowers and grass, it was gone.

Historically, the main goals of art conservation have been to make the original materials last as long as possible and/or to diminish the appearance of damage. Thanks to this approach, as we walk down the halls of the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center and Getty Villa, we can still marvel at the same artworks that inspired humans hundreds and thousands of years ago.

But how do you conserve more recent art, like site-specific works exposed to environmental changes, as in the case of Malibu Line? What about Alison Saar’s paintings, which repurpose found objects with their own history of aging, or Fred Eversley’s lenslike sculptures, created with modern materials such as polyester resin?

These are some of the artworks discussed in Artist Dialogues, a video series produced by the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI). Available on YouTube, the 10-minute videos feature interviews with contemporary artists from various genres and mediums, delving into their overarching philosophies, materials, and working methods, as well as their thoughts on conservation. The short films also provide a behind-the-scenes look into the artists’ studios and/or follow their creative process as they work. Recent dialogues have been screened at the Getty Center, accompanied by live Q&As with the participants.

Art from the 20th century to today is infinitely diverse in both material and concept, necessitating a variety of approaches to conserve it. One common thread, though, is the need to understand what qualities in an artwork, whether material, aesthetic, or conceptual, are important to preserve. Now in its 11th iteration, the series is a glimpse into the conservation process of consulting artists about the properties that define their output, capturing their varied attitudes toward nontraditional materials and art practices. Condensed into an easy-to-digest format and featuring their voices alongside footage of them at work, the dialogues offer a unique opportunity for artists to share these perspectives with the public, often for the very first time.

A microcosm of contemporary art

The idea for Artist Dialogues began with chemist and conservator Tom Learner, head of science at the GCI, and conservator Rachel Rivenc, head of conservation and preservation at the Getty Research Institute. In 2016, while working at the GCI, Rivenc authored the Getty publication Made in Los Angeles: Materials, Processes, and the Birth of West Coast Minimalism, an analysis of conservation issues surrounding the work of Light and Space artists such as Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, and John McCracken. Drawing inspiration from Southern California in the 1960s and ’70s—its sun, sea, cars, film industry, and space technology—these innovators produced works that investigated the interaction of color, light, and space, creating sensory experiences for their viewers.

Bell, for example, utilized a technique known as “vacuum deposition of thin films” to apply a metallic layer to plate glass, altering how it absorbed, reflected, and transmitted light, to stunning effect. These artists often borrowed emerging technologies from local industries, and their fabrication processes were so novel that researchers and conservators have only recently begun to study them in depth.

Through her research, Rivenc found that the conservation issues of Light and Space artworks, which utilized industrial materials in untried ways, were emblematic of broader conservation problems in contemporary art. LA-based practitioners have since continued to challenge conventional creative methods, breaking new ground in conceptual art—where the material is secondary to its meaning—while also creating a rich landscape of street and public art and expressing the diverse identities in the city, foregrounded by the Black and Chicano art movements of the 1960s.

Learner and Rivenc reasoned that contemporary art production in LA—a young, multicultural city open to experimentation—could offer a kaleidoscopic view of how artists approach materials, processes, and conservation everywhere.

To explore artists’ processes in a way that would be accessible to a wide audience—from conservators and curators to art historians and the public—Learner and Rivenc conceived the Artist Dialogues series. The video interviews would also provide opportunities to cultivate connections between the GCI and local contemporary art scenes.

Rivenc oversaw the series for its first few years, which began by featuring pioneers of the Light and Space movement. More recent episodes include LA-based artists taking an eclectic range of approaches, including Gabriel Kuri, David Lamelas, Laura Owens, Saar, and former Getty artists in residence Gala Porras-Kim and Analia Saban. Today the series is managed by Ellen Moody, a conservator who joined the GCI in 2020 but had become acquainted with the videos while working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she consulted the series to understand the process behind some of the works in MoMA’s collection.

“Getting artists to think about the future of their work can be a hard ask, as they tend to focus on its creation,” Moody explains. “But when pressed to reflect on the long term, new insights emerge about what really matters to them. These insights not only guide future conservation strategies but also deepen our understanding of the work.” She now seeks to interview artists whose pieces have interesting challenges that demonstrate the many different forms conservation can take.

Conservation pathways

The videos do not seek to capture a fixed perspective (as artists’ views may evolve over time) or offer a direct how-to for preserving a work. Instead, they illustrate the expansive range of contemporary art conservation.

This variety is evident even among Light and Space artists who worked in Venice, California, in the 1970s. Some, like Eversley, are confident that their polyester artworks may never need to be conserved. “My earliest pieces haven’t changed one iota since they were made,” he says. “The color’s stable. The plastic’s stable. Ninety-nine percent of my pieces have never been conserved.”

Others, such as Helen Pashgian, prefer full restoration of their sculptures should they get only slightly chipped or scratched. “You can sand and polish the scratched part, but then you have to repolish the whole piece.”

Then there are those who find beauty in change, like Bell. “There is a patina that comes to everything with age. I don’t try and fight that patina; I like it.”

Certain artists, such as Albuquerque (whose Artist Dialogues episode is currently in production), see their works as having limited lifespans, like life itself. In her video, she works on a re-creation of Malibu Line 40 years later and reflects on what conservation means for ephemeral works. “Through the use of color and certain geometries, there’s an image that stays in the mind,” she says. “The trace that remains will always be there.”

The diverse perspectives of contemporary artists echo the nuanced approach of conservation, a field that is evolving to incorporate the age of a piece while keeping it intact.

Saar is the most recently profiled artist in the series. Getty hosted a public screening of her episode, “Alison Saar: Found Spirit,” at the end of August, followed by a Q & A with the artist. Her sculptures, installations, and prints explore issues of gender, race, and heritage through the incorporation of humble found materials. For example, Saar has used cast-iron skillets as surfaces for portraits and as symbols of domestic labor.

Saar’s mother is the acclaimed artist Betye Saar, and her father, Richard Saar, was a ceramicist and art conservator, so the question of conservation is not new to her. In a way, it has even enriched her work with an added layer of meaning.

“The paintings that were on skillets were really about the invisible population of domestic workers,” she says in her interview. “And actually the idea that they will fade in time and be absorbed by that, I think is true to the idea that these are people largely invisible and ignored by society, and they come out of the darkness and may have to retract into the darkness again. We’ll see. You just have to make the work and really have faith in what it’s going to be, and if it doesn’t exist forever, that’s fine.”

Watch Artist Dialogues on YouTube and sign up for Getty’s e-newsletter, Get Inspired, to learn about the next Artist Dialogues screening at the Getty Center.