The cover image of issue twenty-one of the
Getty Research Journal features a detail of a Los
Angeles landmark from 1932:
América tropical oprimida y destrozada por los
imperialismos
(Tropical America oppressed and destroyed by imperialism) by
Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974). Painted
on the second-story exterior wall of the Italian Hall along
Olvera Street in El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument,
América tropical, at eighty feet wide by eighteen
feet tall, remains the artist and activist’s only extant
in-situ mural in the United States. Against the backdrop of
Mesoamerican architectural ruins and sculptures overtaken by
rapacious vines and roots, the crucified Indigenous peasant
emerges from the painting’s center. An imperial eagle, head in
profile and wings outspread, perches menacingly at the head of
the cross above the laborer’s slumped body. From the distant
top-right corner of the composition, two crouching
sharpshooters take aim at the enduring symbol of American
colonial dominance.
Siqueiros’s audacious imagery is a far cry from the idyllic
tropical landscape he was commissioned to depict. The intended
mural was but one part of a broader civic campaign of Mission
Revivalism that sought to sanitize the Spanish colonial past
and gloss over the deportation of hundreds of thousands of
Mexican Americans from Los Angeles and other US cities in the
early 1930s. Refusing city officials’ persistent disavowals of
colonial genocide and ethnic cleansing, Siqueiros’s mural puts
the violence front and center. It came as no surprise that the
work was censored within months of its completion in October
1932—city authorities wasted no time whitewashing
América tropical in phases. As author in this issue
Jonah Gray elaborates in his essay “Worldwide Emotion:
Interhemispheric Dialogue in David Alfaro Siqueiros’s
América tropical oprimida y destrozada por los
imperialismos,” the two revolutionary riflemen in the far corner were the
first to be withdrawn from view. For despite their seemingly
marginal location and their diminished shock value compared to
the crucified central figure, Siqueiros positioned the
sharpshooters strategically. As the only figures visible from
street level, the armed revolutionaries personified the
potential to inspire, empower, and, ultimately, recruit the
laboring class to the ongoing cause of resistance.
By 1942 the mural was painted over in its entirety and largely
forgotten until the 1960s, when the emerging Chicano art
movement reignited interest in the buried histories of Mexican
immigrants. Pioneering historian of Latin American art Shifra
Goldman was pivotal to the literal uncovering of
América tropical. After learning of the mural’s
existence directly from Siqueiros in Mexico City in 1968, she
joined countless Chicano artists and activists to lead a
campaign for its preservation. A partnership between the City
of Los Angeles and the nascent Getty Conservation Institute
(founded in 1985) was established in 1988 to conserve and
protect the mural, beginning what would be a twenty-four-year
collaboration. During this period,
América tropical was studied and digitally
documented, a meticulous condition survey was conducted, and
the mural was stabilized. In 2012, eighty years after it was
first shown, América tropical was finally reopened to
the public with a protective canopy shelter, a viewing
platform, and an interpretative center.
Siqueiros’s mural is no less resonant in 2026, when the
current US presidential administration continues to enact and
enforce new campaigns of ethnic cleansing and xenophobic
policy across this stolen land and support similar campaigns
by other governments abroad. We witness the latest
catastrophic episodes of scapegoating by a ruling party as the
250th anniversary of this nation approaches with much fanfare.
Collective grief and despair rise daily as heart-wrenching
news from around the globe accumulates. But in these dark
times we develop resilience. Renewing our commitments to care
for our friends, neighbors, and strangers, and embracing
kinship across differences, we strengthen our local
communities to overcome together. As our predecessors have
done many times before us, we build strategic resistance,
remembering that it is, as Siqueiros’s Los Angeles mural
reminds us, a collective effort.
We offer this latest issue of the journal to our readers as an
invitation to practice slowing down and remaining open. We
hope that the Getty Research Journal can be a shared
platform for reading closely and listening generously,
connecting voices and narratives that challenge us to consider
other values and hold opposing ideas together in thought.
Through close attention to the works of visual culture,
varieties of intellectual labor, and reflections of cultural
workers contained in the pages that follow, we hope that our
readers might be nourished and inspired in some small way for
the ongoing struggle toward social justice, equity, and mutual
care.
Issue twenty-one contains seven full-length research articles,
two shorter notices, and the second installment of the
journal’s new Conversation series. In “The Getty Peacock
Fresco: Unraveling Its History Through Technical and
Historical Investigations” by Kenneth Lapatin, Maria Svoboda,
Sierra Schiano, Monica Ganio, and Karen Trentelman, a curator,
a conservator, a former Getty Graduate Intern, and two
conservation scientists join forces to uncover the unlikely
provenance of the Getty Villa’s iconic peacock fresco
fragment. In “Adding Works to Words: A Letter about Qing Court
Painter Jean-Denis Attiret, S.J. (1702–68) in the Getty
Research Institute,” Kristina Kleutghen addresses the
transcultural life and work of French Jesuit artist Jean-Denis
Attiret, court painter to the Qianlong emperor in China.
Patricia J. Yu considers the extended afterlives of bronze
sculptures from the looted Qing-era Yuanmingyuan (Garden of
Perfect Brightness) in her essay “Fragmented Bodies,
Substitute Bodies: Zodiac Heads from the Garden of Perfect
Brightness and the Translation of Cultural Heritage.” In “The
Global System of the Arts at the End of the Nineteenth Century
and the Commissioning of a Sepulchral Monument in Santiago,
Chile,” Fernando Guzmán offers insight into the complex
negotiations at play in the process of commemorating the late
archbishop Rafael Valentín Valdivieso (1804–78) in sculptural
form. Roger Fayet’s essay “Flaunting the Unfinished:
Non finito as a Classicist Gesture in the Work of
Ferdinand Hodler” analyzes the traces of technical tools in
the work of the famed Swiss painter of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century. Lexington Davis’s interpretation of a
series of Los Angeles performances by a feminist art
collective in “Cleaning Up in Public: Mother Art’s Domestic
Labor Performances, 1973–78” highlights the historically
gendered, classed, and raced dimensions of socially
reproductive work. With “Primed to See: Jeanne
Moutoussamy-Ashe’s
Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers,” Emilie
Chesnutt Boone advances a timely rewriting of photographic
history and its canon. Richly contextualized by Boone,
Moutoussamy-Ashe’s pioneering text on Black women
photographers is “foundational—not only historically
significant but still impactful today, inspiring scholarship
and spurring inquiry,” in the words of
Getty Research Journal Editorial Advisory Committee
member Mazie Harris, who recently organized the J. Paul Getty
Museum iteration of
Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985,
an exhibition originating at the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, where it was curated by Philip Brookman and
Deborah Willis. Writing in the first person in “Becoming
Simone Forti: California, 1970–72,” Megan Metcalf pursues the
material traces of performance in the archive of
multidisciplinary artist Simone Forti. In her diaristic text,
Metcalf reflects on the unique affordances and losses inherent
to both dance and archival research as embodied practices.
Finally, in this issue’s Conversation, we listen in as Kristen
Collins, Glenn Phillips, and Nancy K. Turner, the cocurators
of Lumen: The Art and Science of Light, take us
behind the scenes of making an ambitious exhibition at the
Getty Museum that explored how Muslim, Christian, and Jewish
thinkers in the Middle Ages and contemporary artists of our
time make sense of light, vision, and astronomy.
Lumen was just one of about seventy exhibitions
across Southern California that formed the third edition of
the region-wide PST ART, whose 2024–25 theme was Art and
Science Collide.
To promote transparency and reflect evolving open practices in
the field, a dedicated peer-review drop-down field accompanies
each article in the online issue to indicate the type of
review that each manuscript received. Double-anonymous peer
review, in which an author’s identity is masked from the
reviewer and vice versa, has long been the standard in
academic publishing due to the belief that it reduces bias.
Following from this, many tenure-granting institutions still
require faculty going up for promotion to publish following
this benchmark. As authors and reviewers become more readily
identifiable with their subfields of expertise and
institutions, the double-anonymous standard has become
increasingly challenging to maintain. It is also the case that
more authors today are inclined to write from the vantage
point of their own uniquely embodied subjectivity, implicitly
or explicitly disclosing their identities in the process.
Aspiring to respond nimbly to this changing landscape, the
Getty Research Journal now facilitates, where
relevant, single-anonymous review, in which an author’s
identity is known by the reviewer, and fully transparent
review. Proponents of the latter make the compelling case that
removing the proverbial “mask” of anonymity has the potential
to reduce even more bias and gatekeeping. Additionally, in
exceptional cases where external peer review is not required,
an article or conversation will undergo internal editorial
review by the journal editors. While double-anonymous review
remains our central procedure to support the needs of scholars
and their work, we offer this wider range of review types to
advance scholarly collaboration and accountability,
accommodating those who may prefer to engage in unmasked and
possibly longer-term dialogue. We would also like to
acknowledge the behind-the-scenes labor of our reviewers,
whose contributions made this issue immeasurably stronger.
Effective with the preceding issue (number twenty), each
research article and shorter notice in the
Getty Research Journal is evaluated by a minimum of
two expert reviewers.
In closing, I would like to acknowledge new and departing
members of the journal’s Editorial Advisory Committee. In
August 2025, we bid farewell to David Saunders, former
associate curator of antiquities at the Getty Museum, who,
having been part of the journal’s previous Editorial Board for
more than a decade, was among the journal’s longest-serving
members. David brought continuity of vision and rigor—and no
small measure of wit and levity—to our committee, and David’s
deep insight and pleasant company will be missed. David has
headed back across the Atlantic Ocean to London, where he has
assumed the role of curator of the Greek World at the British
Museum. Last summer, we welcomed Jens Daehner, curator of
antiquities at the Getty Museum, to the journal’s Editorial
Advisory Committee. Trained in classical archaeology at the
Freie Universität in Berlin and a seasoned curator at the
Getty Villa Museum, Jens has organized exhibitions on
Hellenistic sculpture, Roman imperial portraits and their
modern copies, and the role of ancient art in
twentieth-century modernism. The Getty Museum’s catalog of
Roman sculpture and the reinstallation of the Villa’s
permanent collection galleries are among Jens’s current
projects. This past spring, we also said goodbye for now to
Editorial Advisory Committee member Kristin Juarez, who was
previously senior research specialist for the African American
Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute. A
generous collaborator and inspiring visionary, Kristin helped
us reimagine and realize the new chapter of the
Getty Research Journal, which continues to take shape
as an institutional endeavor fueled by a small, committed team
of individuals. We wish Kristin the best as head of
collections at the California African American Museum in Los
Angeles and look forward to future collaborations across this
complex city that many of us call home.
Los Angeles, June 2026