The appearance of this twentieth issue of the
Getty Research Journal marks its first year as an
open-access publication. Freely accessible to anyone with an
internet connection in web, PDF, and e-book formats, the
journal has dramatically expanded its readership worldwide.
Our editorial and production teams have learned countless
lessons along the way, and there is no doubt that the learning
process will continue as new challenges arise in an
ever-evolving digital landscape. We are grateful to our
authors and readers, longstanding and newfound alike, for
joining us in the cybersphere and supporting this historic
transition.
Several momentous changes have taken place for the journal
since the publication of our first open-access issue (no. 19).
Last summer, following the achievement of their vision of an
open-access Getty Research Journal, ten members of
the journal’s former Editorial Board concluded their tenures,
paving the way for a new cohort to lead in this vital advisory
function. I extend my profound thanks to the outgoing board
members, all of whom served in their capacity as Getty staff,
many having done so continuously since the journal’s nascence:
Scott Allan, LeRonn Brooks, Anne-Lise Desmas, Tom Learner,
Mary E. Miller, Rebecca Peabody, Andrew Perchuk, Richard Rand,
Alexa Sekyra, and Naoko Takahatake. Among them, I would like
to highlight Mary E. Miller, who, during her distinguished
tenure as director of the Getty Research Institute (GRI),
welcomed a sea change at the
Getty Research Journal that will continue to unfold
beyond her retirement from the GRI.
As the journal embarks on its next chapter, I am thrilled to
introduce the Getty Research Journal’s new Editorial
Advisory Committee. Its nine members come from various Getty
programs as well as external academic institutions, and they
bring a wealth of scholarly, curatorial, pedagogical, and
publishing experience that will guide us into the future.
Committee members will serve limited terms of three to five
years, which may be renewed. Leonard Folgarait is a renowned
scholar of modern Latin American, US American, and European
art and architecture with a specialization in
twentieth-century Mexico, a topic on which he has published
four books singularly attuned to the intersection of art and
politics. He previously served on the board of
Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. A
celebrated educator and mentor, Folgarait recently retired
from Vanderbilt University, where he served as distinguished
professor of history of art and architecture. Susan Elizabeth
Gagliardi is a professor of art history at Emory University
and has published two books on arts of West Africa:
Senufo Unbound: Dynamics of Art and Identity (2014)
and
Seeing the Unseen: Arts of Power Associations on the
Senufo-Mande Cultural “Frontier”
(2022). Her pedagogy and research seek to promote justice and
well-being within the discipline and institutions of art
history. Gagliardi cochairs, with Brett Pyper,
#JustAndEquitableNow: Reimagining Arts and Humanities in Our
Universities, a collaborative research project that brings
together a multidisciplinary team of scholars from South
Africa and the United States to respond to demands for better
futures within their institutions and communities. A scientist
trained in metals conservation, Stavroula Golfomitsou recently
joined the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) as head of
collections, in which capacity she oversees movable heritage
collections, strengthens existing GCI initiatives, and
develops new projects in partnership with outside
institutions; extensive teaching and academic programming at
the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and the University
College London Qatar preceded her arrival to Los Angeles.
Golfomitsou previously served on the Council of the
International Institute for Conservation of Historic and
Artistic Works (IIC) and currently holds positions on the
editorial boards of numerous journals in the conservation
sciences. Mazie M. Harris is an expert in US American
photography past and present, and she is associate curator in
the Department of Photographs of the J. Paul Getty Museum. Her
current research addresses photography’s role in environmental
movements; María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold (2025)
is her most recent exhibition. Kristin Juarez is a senior
research specialist for the African American Art History
Initiative at the GRI; her research engages histories of
collaboration and multidisciplinary experimentation at the
intersection of visual art, performance, and the moving image.
Juarez previously served as a founding editorial board member
for the journal liquid blackness. She cocurated the
exhibition
Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures (2021)
and coedited its award-winning catalog with Rebecca Peabody
and Glenn Phillips. Alpesh Kantilal Patel is associate
professor of global contemporary art and LGBT*Q theory at the
Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University; their
art historical scholarship, curating, and criticism reflect a
queer, antiracist, and transcultural approach to contemporary
art. Patel previously chaired the editorial board of
Art Journal and Art Journal Open; their
recent publications include
Productive failure: Writing queer South Asian art
histories
(2017) and
Storytellers of Art Histories: Living and Sustaining a
Creative Life,
coedited with Yasmeen Siddiqui (2022). An expert in the
history of postwar architecture, Emily Pugh is a principal
research specialist at the GRI, where she oversees the program
in digital art history. Author of
Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin
(2014) and coeditor, with Andrew Perchuk, Zanna Gilbert, Tracy
Stuber, and Isabel Frampton Wade, of the open-access volume
Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles: Artist, Image, Archive,
City
(2025), Pugh has worked in digital publishing since 2001,
having served as the web developer of the born-digital journal
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. Last but not least,
two members of the Getty Research Journal’s newly
appointed Editorial Advisory Committee were part of the
journal’s previous board; each has kindly agreed to lend
continuity by serving an additional advisory term into this
next phase. Maristella Casciato is the senior curator of
architecture at the GRI, where she is responsible for the
acquisition and stewardship of key collections such as the
archive of Frank Gehry, which includes hundreds of
architectural models, and the Paul R. Williams drawings and
papers; among the most recent of her numerous exhibitions and
publications are Bauhaus Beginnings (2019) and
Le Corbusier: Album Punjab, 1951 (2024). David
Saunders is associate curator of antiquities at the J. Paul
Getty Museum; a specialist in Greek and South Italian vase
painting, ancient bronzes, and the history of collecting and
restoring antiquities, he recently cocurated the exhibition
Picture Worlds: Greek, Maya, and Moche Pottery (2024)
at the Getty Villa and the Carlos Museum at Emory University,
and coedited the accompanying catalog with Megan E. O’Neil.
The Editorial Advisory Committee and editorial team convened
in person last fall on the Getty campus in Los Angeles for a
two-day retreat, the first gathering of this kind for the
journal. Throughout full days of panels and workshops,
balanced with wellness breaks for mindfulness and play, we
addressed the changing landscape of so-called art history and
grappled with the challenges and opportunities facing an
open-access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal such as this one.
We brainstormed the possible roles that the
Getty Research Journal could serve in this space and
began articulating a new vision for a path forward, which will
unfold in the seasons to come, beginning with this issue.
Six full-length articles, one shorter notice, and an inaugural
installment of a new Conversation series constitute the
current issue. They cover an apparently heterogeneous yet
interrelated set of subjects and themes, all situated in the
modern and contemporary periods. In “Remembering and Remaking
Christofle et Cie’s Second Empire,” Amy F. Ogata takes on fine
metalworking in late nineteenth-century France, interpreting
Christofle et Cie’s reconstruction and photographic
preservation of pieces originally commissioned during an
earlier period and subsequently destroyed in a fire as at once
an act of mourning and a deliberate reclamation of French
design history. Samuel Johnson similarly brings fresh insight,
in this case to a less-familiar facet of Soviet photographic
practice, in “Victorious Laughter: Satirical Photomontage in
Brigade KGK’s Photo Series
From the 16th to the 17th Congress of the All-Union
Communist Party (Bolsheviks).” In a close reading of the artist collective’s mass-produced
photo series of 1934, which illustrates one of Joseph Stalin’s
major political speeches, Johnson discerns a surprisingly
broad range of experimental techniques used to create
distortions and evoke laughter; such technical manipulations
rendered satirical photomontages legible to audiences. James
Oles narrates an art historical detective story of his own
experience in “Bennett Buck’s Good Neighbor Policy: A
Case of Mistaken Identity.” Written in the first person, Oles
recounts the misattribution of a little-known work by a New
Deal–era painter born in Syracuse, New York, to the legendary
Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco and the considerable
hurdles to be overcome when setting the historical and
provenance record straight. Alex Kitnick’s “Talking Criticism
with David Antin, or Criticism at the Boundaries” situates
Antin’s multifaceted practice at the intersection of
experimental poetry, postconceptual art, and an intimate form
of criticism. Kitnick concludes that the poet-artist-critic’s
work is fundamentally concerned with the social formation
where poetry and criticism take place: if not the public, what
Kitnick calls “interested parties.” In “Lisette Model: Twelve Photographs:
The Limited-Edition Portfolio and the Market for Photographic
Prints in the United States,” Audrey Sands outlines the
fundamental role that the invention of the limited-edition
portfolio played in dramatically increasing the marketability
of Model’s photography as well as activating the broader
market for prints in the United States; in the 1970s,
photographs entered major public museums and private
collections at unprecedented rates. Rita Elizabeth Risser
offers a timely and perceptive analysis of a decommissioned
state prison in Philadelphia that sat vacant for twenty-three
years before reopening in 1994 as a historic site and museum.
Addressing the ethical question of what should be preserved as
cultural heritage and the pitfalls of curating potential
monuments to incarceration in “Unlocking Heritage at the
Eastern State Penitentiary,” Risser interprets it today as an
open museum where people may gather as a public defined by a
shared interest in present-day issues such as mass
incarceration. In the shorter notice “Like Father, Like
Daughter: A Sketchbook Shared by Raymond and Rosa Bonheur,
Rediscovered,” Alexandra Morrison directs new attention to a
sketchbook in the GRI’s holdings that was mistakenly
attributed solely to the nineteenth-century French painter
Rosa Bonheur. In fact, the evidence suggests that the
carnet was purchased by the artist’s father, Raymond
Bonheur, as early as 1835. Into the 1850s, both father and
daughter filled the sketchbook with drawings, studies, and
notes. With the presentation of these articles as well as
future contributions to the Getty Research Journal,
we endeavor to galvanize far-reaching publics about the value
and potential of art and architectural history as means to
connect with what is human.
The final feature is the first in the journal’s new
Conversation series, wherein we invite our readers to actively
“listen in” to a dialogue between interlocutors who may be
colleagues, collaborators, friends, or merely professional
acquaintances. They are all engaged in the practice of
supporting, producing, and interpreting culture; their
conversations might explore a topic that inflects their
respective practices or offer behind-the-scenes perspectives
on the making, transmission, and reception of a work of art,
exhibition, or cultural project. Through this new venue, we
hope to illuminate aspects of cultural labor (artistic, art
historical, museological, pedagogical, emotional, or other)
that often go unacknowledged or remain overshadowed.
At the time of writing this note, two weeks after wildfires of
unprecedented magnitude razed two historic Los Angeles
neighborhoods beyond recognition, and mere days following the
tumultuous start of Donald Trump’s second term in the White
House, the poignancy of “Belonging Elsewhere: Felipe Baeza and
Laura G. Gutiérrez in Conversation” cannot be overstated. As
visual artist Baeza and scholar of performance and Chicanx
studies Gutiérrez invite readers in to their exchange about
the making of Baeza’s public art commission
Unruly Forms (2023) and their parallel trajectories
as cultural producers, they share intimate details about their
respective experiences of immigrating from Mexico as children,
growing up in the Catholic Church, and coming of age as queer
adolescents in the largest city of the Midwest. Through a
nuanced analysis of the intricate iconographies that compose
Baeza’s mixed-media collages, the interlocutors reveal the
existential and political realities of living and even
thriving in the United States with undocumented or
resident-alien status. It is in Baeza and Gutiérrez’s moving
discussion of what it means not to belong that the liberating
potential to belong anywhere, everywhere, and elsewhere
emerges as a voluntary and tactical condition of persevering
and creating under the strictures of legal exclusion and
ongoing threats of deportation or imprisonment. As the powers
that be continue to arbitrate—to grave consequence—the status
of who “belongs” and who does not in this settler country
where the vast majority of us are the descendants of
immigrants, if not immigrants ourselves, collective despair at
the tragedy of these historically fatal repetitions threatens
to paralyze us once again. I have been reminded by others much
wiser that the most meaningful work lies before us. To abide
by our commitments with renewed focus and dignity is the
ultimate and most enduring form of resistance to powers and
values to which we do not subscribe. Pursuing this important
work of embracing alterity and forging connections, making the
arts and humanities legible and accessible to a broader
public, cultivating shared spaces in which to flourish through
community: this is how we sustain ourselves and each other
into the future.
Los Angeles, January 2025