A New Kind of Honor: The Getty Medal
A look back at the first luminaries celebrated by Getty for their unique contributions to the art world
Getty Medalist Yo-Yo Ma performs with members of the Silk Road Ensemble.
Body Content
On a clear night in December 2013, members of the Getty community—artists, philanthropists, collectors, and scholars—ascended a carpet of blue light up the wide steps to the Museum, following the sounds of a jazz trio.
They were gathering to celebrate honorees of the first-ever Getty Medal, an award created by Getty trustees to recognize extraordinary achievement in the practice, understanding, and support of the arts and humanities.
Then-President and CEO Jim Cuno and Mark Siegel, then-chair of Getty’s board of trustees, introduced the recipients: Harold M. Williams, founding president and CEO of the Getty Trust, and his wife, Nancy Englander, the Trust’s original director of program planning and analysis. Both were hired in 1981 when Getty was a nascent organization created by J. Paul Getty’s visionary bequest establishing the world’s largest philanthropy dedicated to the visual arts.
Getty Medalists Thelma Golden (left) and Lorna Simpson
Harold M. Williams and Nancy Englander, the first Getty Medalists
Williams and Englander embarked on an intensive period of research and discussions, consulting often with the founding trustees, and a year later emerged with a plan: Getty would be a philanthropic trust with branches dedicated to four core interests: grants supporting arts and education; conservation science; scholarly research and art history; and collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting the world’s artistic heritage. While Getty’s public presence at the time consisted only of the Villa, Williams and Englander envisioned a campus that would unify these independent institutes and serve as a destination for the arts—a vision that became the Getty Center.
As Jim Cuno remarked, “It’s fitting that the first award should go to the two people who gave intellectual structure and physical form to Mr. Getty’s vision.”
Since that first celebration, Getty Medal dinners have continued to be festive events designed to introduce new stakeholders to Getty’s work while spotlighting the people driving real change in cultural arenas around the world.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti addresses guests at the Center in 2019, with an artwork by Lorna Simpson, one of that year’s honorees, projected in the event space
The award’s second year honored Lord Jacob Rothschild of the United Kingdom for his decades of influential leadership in the preservation of built cultural heritage. In 2015 architect Frank Gehry received the Medal, and in 2016 it went to artist Ellsworth Kelly and cellist Yo-Yo Ma, “one of our greatest ambassadors for international cultural understanding,” as Cuno described him.
Medals were awarded to writer Mario Vargas Llosa and artist Anselm Kiefer in 2017; Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, and sculptor Richard Serra in 2018; and classicist Mary Beard and artists Ed Ruscha and Lorna Simpson in 2019. Scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah, artist Martin Puryear, and philanthropist Alice Walton were named as honorees in 2020. Their ceremony was postponed due to the pandemic and will take place this October.
Former Getty President and CEO Jim Cuno and Getty Medalist Ed Ruscha, 2019
Like that first night in 2013, the next Getty Medal dinner promises to be a star-filled evening that guests, and guests of honor, will never forget.
As Professor Appiah said upon hearing of his award: “I have always felt it a great privilege to be invited into conversations with those who sustain the arts. The Getty Medal has established itself by the range and luster of its recipients, and I am honored and humbled to join their company.”
