Getty Announces New Global Art and Sustainability Fellows Program

Amid another year of climate disasters, from flooding, extreme heat, and hurricanes to the devastating wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles, Getty announced today a multi-year global initiative that unites contributions from the art and culture sector with the worldwide push towards sustainability.

The Getty Global Art and Sustainability Fellows program will support early-career professionals and visual artists at the forefront of international conversations on climate resiliency at 15 cultural and scientific organizations on six continents. With Getty support, fellows will contribute to critical priorities around sustainable management of heritage resources, apply cutting-edge science to the cultural sector, and communicate the cultural dimensions of the climate and biodiversity crises to broader audiences.

“Getty is launching this initiative amongst global concern about climate threats and the need for practical solutions, and we continue to believe that the arts can play an unorthodox but compelling role in this conversation,” says Katherine Fleming, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust. “This is just one part of a much larger, holistic approach by Getty around sustainability, which includes its physical locations, its many global projects, and major regional collaborations like PST ART: Art & Science Collide. This is a major step forward in this work.”

Participating organizations that will host fellows include the Academy of Athens (Greece), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Guggenheim Bilbao (Spain), James Cook University (Australia), Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi (Brazil), the Image Permanence Institute at Rochester Institute of Technology (US), Singapore Art Museum and National Gallery Singapore, University College London’s Institute for Sustainable Heritage, and the Photosynthesis networked artist residency program at Denniston Hill (US), LUMA Arles (France), Pivô (Brazil), Srihatta-Samdani Art Centre & Sculpture Park (Bangladesh), Tate St Ives (UK), and The Mothership (Morocco).

Learn more about the details of each grant.

Getty Global Fellows will advance two key areas of work at the intersection of art and sustainability that are of critical importance to the cultural sector. The first area is preserving collections and sites threatened by climate change through technical investigations and planning. Projects range from mathematical modeling of how different environmental scenarios affect objects in museums, libraries, and archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France to expanding the Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI), a rapid assessment tool used to examine climate impacts on World Heritage properties and other heritage sites.

“We urgently need more qualified professionals in heritage sustainability, so our first Getty Global Fellow will focus on expanding training to accelerate CVI implementation in high-needs areas around the world,” says Scott Heron, professor of physics at James Cook University who co-developed the CVI and is the UNESCO Chair on Climate Change Vulnerability of Natural and Cultural Heritage. The CVI has already been implemented at 19 UNESCO sites. “We’re also collaborating with First Nations people to tailor the CVI approach to the perspectives of Indigenous groups. The Land and Sea Country of many peoples are in zones of elevated risk.”

All participating organizations are known for boosting sustainability in the arts and cultural heritage fields as demonstrated by their operations and programs. For example, Tate, Guggenheim Bilbao, and National Gallery Singapore are among the leading museums responding to the climate crisis, with initiatives in place to be at least carbon neutral by 2045 or earlier. UCL’s Institute for Sustainable Heritage and RIT’s Image Permanence Institute have a combined 60-plus year track record in delivering sustainable solutions to real-world cultural heritage and collections management problems. The Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi (Belém, Brazil), the oldest scientific research institution in the Brazilian Amazon, safeguards one of the most significant cultural collections in the region and leads collaborative initiatives with Indigenous peoples and traditional communities. These programs explore cultural preservation and sustainability in the face of today’s critical challenges to the Amazon and will inform new actions leading up to COP30.

The other priority area of the fellows program is interpretive work that can raise awareness around climate resilience, including artist residencies, public art, and innovative approaches to sharing information about climate action.

“So many artists are making powerful work that is ecologically engaged, and our Photosynthesis project will bring a cohort of them together through these networked residencies,” says Anne Barlow, director of Tate St Ives. “The Photosynthesis residencies may be in very different environments, from the west coast of Cornwall to Tangier to northeast Bangladesh which has one of the highest annual rainfall rates in the world. As several organizations are in non-urban locations already experiencing climate challenges, we are eager to see the research, community engagement, and new works that emerge from this collaboration.”

Fellows will be drawn from a wide range of disciplines and specializations, including higher education, museums and galleries, libraries and archives, cultural heritage management, and all areas of visual arts practice. Each Fellow will be in place for two years, with organizations hosting up to three consecutive fellows.

“These partners were chosen for their abilities to advance the field at this intersection with sustainability, and we anticipate that their efforts as part of this program will contribute leadership and changemaking in this area,” says Camille Kirk, sustainability director at Getty. “We look forward to convening these experts so they can connect, discover potential collaborations, and share the regional, national, and global implications of their work as they help to further develop the research and build adaptive skills across the cultural sector.”