Meet Getty’s New CEO

It’s Katherine E. Fleming’s third week as Getty president and CEO, and her office has, understandably, the sparse look of brand-new occupancy.

But the space does already feature one personal touch: a photo, prominently displayed, of the Getty Center under construction in the 1990s. Fleming lived in L.A. at that time and vividly remembers going to the Center’s opening celebration in 1997 with her four-year-old daughter. John Papadopoulos, then a curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum, had invited her, and she was thrilled to attend an event that was the “hot talk of the town.”

“I was really preoccupied with the big stones with the fossils embedded in them,” she remembers. “I also spent a lot of time calming the nerves of my daughter, who was totally freaked out by the giant puppets walking around.” (The puppets were inspired by James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889.) “But there was definitely a palpable feeling that this was a huge new thing on the L.A. scene.”

25 years later, Fleming has just succeeded Jim Cuno, who retired as president and CEO earlier this year. She comes to this role after serving as provost (chief academic officer) of New York University (NYU) since 2016, and she’ll draw on her decades of scholarship on Mediterranean, Jewish, and Greek history and religion.

Fleming began her academic career in Southern California in the 1990s, working as a lecturer at universities around the region before joining NYU’s history department in 1998 as an assistant professor, eventually becoming Alexander S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic Culture & Civilization in the department of history and in the Onassis Program in Hellenic Studies. Her other pursuits have included cofounding a multiyear oral history project in Greece that has collected 55,000 stories.

In her first few weeks at Getty’s helm, Fleming has spent most of her days meeting her new colleagues and learning how Getty operates. But she recently found time to sit down with us and share a little about herself.

What were your earliest experiences with culture, museums, and art?

They were mainly experiences given to me by my parents. I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. My father is a professor specializing in medieval iconography, and particularly medieval literature of France and England, at Princeton University, and my mother is a British-born Episcopal priest. Both of my parents are interested in medieval art and architecture, so we spent a huge amount of time in Italy, France, and the United Kingdom while they did research or visited family, and I was taken to pretty much every conceivable museum, building of interest, or church.

I didn’t always understand what I was seeing, but I understood that it was important to see things of this sort. Other than being given the basic info, like “Saint Francis was from here,” my parents did not give my brother and me little lectures as we went around Europe, thank heavens. One of the most striking things about these places was the size and texture of the stones used in construction. When you’re a kid, you absorb things sensorily much more than you absorb them intellectually.

The first museums I went to were the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. I can certainly remember lots of rainy, rainy days at the V&A. Again, it was the structures themselves that were almost as striking as the collections within them. I think that was an indicator to me that culture mattered, or that the things inside mattered, since they lived in buildings you’d associate with royalty.

How did you decide to pursue scholarship in religion and history?

I didn’t go into school thinking, oh, I want to study comparative religion. I took my first comparative religion class because it fit into my schedule. And it turned out to be taught by someone I found super, super interesting. That was the first time I had thought about religion not as something “spiritual” or “divine,” but rather as culture, as a cultural product like a work of art or music. I spent a lot of time reading anthropological texts about religion. And I’m sure that coming out of a religiously oriented family—we went to church every Sunday, and I was expected to sing in the church choir—it was particularly interesting to me to think about religion in a comparative context. I’m also really fascinated by languages and liked reading texts in their original languages. And so I became a religion major.

You moved to California to get your PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and then to L.A. to teach history at universities in the Southern California area. What were you imagining yourself doing for a career at that point? And during this time, did you visit the Getty Villa, and if so, what did you think of it?

Of course I visited the Getty Villa! I thought it was very impressive and, architecturally, I found it pretty wild to see this attempt to build a Herculaneum on the Pacific. Careerwise, I was all over the place!

What made you decide to join Getty as CEO?

The opportunity came along at the moment in my career arc when I was ready to wind down my work as provost of NYU. I didn’t know what the thing after that was going to be. But I was pretty sure I didn’t want to stay in higher education administration, which is a tough, exhausting line of work. I felt like I had done all I could do in that realm. And I thought, maybe I’ll go on leave and write some books or do something different with my life. This came along at a moment when I was imagining doing something much more radical than I ever would have imagined just a few years prior. It really helped that I had lived in L.A. before and that I had been really happy living here. It helped that I had prior knowledge of the institution—I had known a lot of people who had been scholars at the Getty Research Institute and people who had worked with the organization. I also loved that Getty is “academia adjacent.” By that I mean, in the ideal scenario it can have the collegiality and sense of collective knowledge production that are hallmarks of the academy, with the potential for the more outward-facing and dynamic qualities that can sometimes be missing from academic institutions. Joining Getty was definitely a sharp turn, but it came along at the right moment.

How will your experience at NYU impact your approach at Getty?

Higher education retains, at its best moments, the feeling of being a collaborative, nonhierarchical community engaged in the collective pursuit of knowledge production. I could meet a physicist, not really know anything about what that person is doing, yet know that we have the commonality of being colleagues and scholars engaged in the same activity of knowledge production. That’s something I hope exists here at Getty—but to the extent that it doesn’t, or could be amplified, that’s something that would inform the way I do things here.

You have to assume that people have their own areas of expertise, that they know what they’re doing, and probably know how to do it better than I would know how to do it. And then you have to allow people to do the things they’re really good at.

How are you spending your first few months on the job?

I’m trying to spend a lot of my time walking around. That’s a very New York thing to say, but both on campus and at home, I’ve been getting out as much as I can. In fact, this interview is one of the few meetings I’ve had here in my office rather than somewhere else. One of the first things I read on arrival was the results of the recent “climate survey,” a questionnaire many Getty staff filled out about their perspectives on the institution. So I am trying to learn as much as I can about workload, work flexibility, and the job satisfaction that people do—or don’t—feel working here. I have also been trying to learn what different people’s areas of expertise are.