As with the previous PST initiatives, the participating organizations constitute a community of institutions throughout Southern California, diverse in profile but joined by a common purpose. Participants funded in the research and planning stage include civic institutions such as LACMA and the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, academic institutions including California Institute of Technology and Southern California Institute of Architecture, university-affiliated museums and galleries such as the Hammer and the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside, organizations working at the convergence of contemporary art and science including Fathomers and Fulcrum Arts, and museums focused on particular fields of the arts, such as the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. The participating institutions cluster in and around Los Angeles, but are spread as far south as San Diego and as far north as Santa Barbara.
“PST comes at a moment when so many museums and visual arts organizations are struggling to stay afloat after being closed for nearly a year,” says César García-Alvarez, director and chief curator at The Mistake Room. “Getty’s research support allows institutions like ours to take on major projects that not only encourage us to think big, but also gift us opportunities to build meaningful community partnerships for the future.”
Like the first two PST collaborations, the participating cultural and scientific institutions, large and small, will present their research in exhibitions, publications, performances, and public conversations and programs that bring artists and scientists in dialogue with each other and with community leaders and the public. A second round of grants from the Getty Foundation, to be announced at a later date, will support the implementation of the exhibitions. Several additional projects are in development, including exhibition and programming partnerships, and will also be announced in coming months.
See a complete list of partner institutions to date and their projects.
Thematic Overview of the Next Pacific Standard Time
Exhibitions on environmental justice and sustainability include:
- Sinks: Places We Call Home (Self Help Graphics and Arts), presenting interdisciplinary, research-based projects by artists Beatriz Jaramillo and Maru Garcia about the long-standing reservoirs of industrial pollution in two communities of color near the institution’s studios
- World Without End (California African American Museum), an examination of the legacy of Dr. George Washington Carver—a public proponent of sustainable organic agriculture and a practicing artist—and the impact of his thinking on contemporary artists
- Carolina Caycedo (Vincent Price Art Museum), an exhibition of the artist’s collaborative work with scientists, engineers, and local communities across the Americas to envision equitable and sustainable water use
Projects focused on climate change include:
- Ice Age Field Site (Working Title) (La Brea Tar Pits), featuring an installation by artist Mark Dion that uses the museum’s ongoing paleontological excavations and Ice Age specimens to connect climate change in the Los Angeles Basin 50,000 years ago to climate change today
- Breath(e) (The Hammer), bringing together contemporary artists with environmental scientists, atmospheric chemists, social justice activists, architects, and designers to generate new ways of countering threats to our planetary lungs: earth’s oceans and forests
- Olafur Eliasson (MOCA), a large-scale, interactive, commissioned installation at the museum’s Geffen Contemporary responding to the geography and ecology of Los Angeles, supported by examples of the artist’s past works including his Glacier Melt series (1999/2019)
Exhibitions that center on Indigenous knowledge include:
- Cosmovisión Indígena (Santa Barbara City College), preserving and sharing traditional Mixtec and Zapotec dyeing and weaving technologies through a community-based laboratory and the production of new textile-based works
- Indigenous Futures (Autry Museum), exploring the work of Native artists who use themes of Western science fiction to reinstate and celebrate Indigenous peoples and their traditions of environmental understanding and protection
- Cultures of Corn (Fowler Museum at UCLA), exhibiting works spanning 8,000 years, from Olmec jade tools to contemporary art installations and performances, to synthesize research into the development and transmission of Indigenous knowledge about the cultivation of maize
Exhibitions that feature global histories of science and art include:
- Cosmologies (LACMA), a major loan exhibition of artworks representing ancient systems of cosmology across the Americas, Egypt, China, India, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East—from the Neolithic period to the present
- Wonders of Creation (San Diego Museum of Art), investigating the intersections between art and science in the Islamic world from the 7th century until now, centering on the 13th century cosmology of Zakariya ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini
- Seeing for Yourself (The Huntington), investigating how artists and scientists have used visual media to make scientific research visible and understandable through new studies of the institution’s unparalleled collections of the history of science from the 16th century to the present
Projects investigating technology and futurism include:
- The Rise of Cyberpunk and Digital Dystopias (Academy Museum of Motion Pictures), tracing the scientific, technological, and cultural developments behind movies such as Blade Runner, Akira*, and The Matrix, as well as under-recognized cyberpunk films from Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America
- Invisibility: Powers and Perils (Skirball Cultural Center), revealing themes of dematerialization, social marginalization, and surveillance in 21st century science and technology, featuring research scientists such as Joy Buolamwini of the Algorithmic Justice League
- Planet City (Southern California Institute of Architecture), using an architectural installation (designed by movie modelers and visual effects artists) and an interactive video game to imagine a world in which all 7 billion humans live in a single, environmentally sustainable mega-city, leaving the rest of the planet to revert to wilderness
Other major themes include medicine and the body, the science and technology of architecture and design, scientific imaging techniques, and digital surveillance and artificial intelligence.
About Pacific Standard Time
Pacific Standard Time is an unprecedented series of collaborations among institutions across Southern California. In each, organizations simultaneously present research-based exhibitions and programs that explore and illuminate a significant theme in the region’s cultural history.
In Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980, more than 60 cultural institutions joined forces between October 2011 and March 2012 and rewrote the history of the birth and impact of the L.A. art scene. In Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, presented from September 2017 through January 2018, more than 70 institutions collaborated on a paradigm-shifting examination of Latin American and Latinx art, seen together as a hemispheric continuum.
Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty.