Established in 2013 by the trustees of the J. Paul Getty Trust, the J. Paul Getty Medal has been awarded to 11 distinguished individuals to honor their extraordinary contributions to the practice, understanding, and support of the arts.
“We award the Getty Medal to recognize outstanding achievement in the fields in which we work,” said Maria Hummer-Tuttle, chair, J. Paul Getty Board of Trustees. “We are honored to present the medal this year to three leaders who have helped transform and deepen our understanding and appreciation of the visual arts and the humanities.”
James Cuno, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, said of artist Lorna Simpson, “She is at once a photographer and multimedia artist whose work is both trenchant in its critique of race, gender, and identity, and exquisite in its formal beauty and technical execution.”
“I am humbled by this honor,” said Ms. Simpson. “I am so thrilled to receive the Getty Medal.”
Mr. Cuno hailed Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge, author of numerous books on Roman history, Classics Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and, with Simon Schama and David Olusoga, presenter of the BBC series Civilisations, as “one of the world’s premier public intellectuals and Classical scholars, whose scholarship is both deeply original and broadly accessible. Professor Beard has illuminated the ancient world for countless readers and students”.
Said Professor Beard, “I am very honored by this award, and appreciative of the Getty and its trustees for the work they do to further knowledge and appreciation of the ancient world.”
Mr. Cuno praised Ed Ruscha as “one of our generation’s most original artists, a distinguished and profound painter, draftsman, photographer, and bookmaker who finds profundity in the commonplace, through art that is at once highly conceptual, elegant, witty, and technically masterful,” noting the Getty Research Institute’s recent acquisition of Mr. Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles archive.
“I am deeply honored to join my fellow Getty Medalists in receiving the Getty Medal,” said Mr. Ruscha.
The awards will be presented in September at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
Past recipients of the J. Paul Getty Medal have included Harold Williams and Nancy Englander, who were honored for their leadership in creating today’s Getty; Lord Jacob Rothschild, for his leadership in the preservation of built cultural heritage; Frank Gehry, for transforming the built landscape with buildings such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall; Yo-Yo Ma, for his efforts to deepen understanding of the world’s diverse cultures; Ellsworth Kelly, for paintings and sculptures of the highest quality and originality; Anselm Kiefer, for his powerful, complex paintings and sculptures; Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, college professor and recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature; Thelma Golden, for her influential leadership; Agnes Gund, for her philanthropy and commitment to justice; and sculptor Richard Serra, who expanded our definition of sculpture.
BIOS
Mary Beard
Mary Beard is one of Britain’s best-known Classicists—a distinguished Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Newnham College, where she has taught for the last 30 years. She has written numerous books on the Ancient World, including the 2008 Wolfson Prize-winner Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town, which portrays a vivid account of life in Pompeii in all its aspects, from food to sex to politics. Previous books include The Roman Triumph, Classical Art from Greece to Rome and books on the Parthenon and the Colosseum. Her interests range from the social and cultural life of Ancient Greece and Rome to the Victorian understanding of antiquity. Her book, SPQR—A History of Ancient Rome, was published to critical and popular acclaim as was the best-selling Women & Power, based on lectures given as part of the London Review of Books Winter Lecture Series.
Professor Beard is Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement and writes an engaging blog, A Don’s Life, selections of which have been published in book form. Confronting the Classics, a collection of essays and reviews that Mary has written over the last 20 years for the Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, was published in 2013.
Professor Beard has been invited to deliver various prestigious lecture series. In 2008, Mary was visiting Sather Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she gave the Sather lectures on Roman laughter (A book, Laughter in Ancient Rome, based on the lectures, was published by the University of California Press). In 2011 Professor Beard delivered the Mellon Lectures at the National Art Gallery, Washington, on the imagery of the Caesars. Professor Beard’s academic achievement was acknowledged in 2010 by the British Academy which elected her as a Fellow and in October 2011 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as a Foreign Honorary Member. In 2012 she was also elected as an International Member of the American Philosophical Society. In the Queen’s Birthday Honours list for 2018, she was awarded the DBE for services to Classical scholarship. In 2014 the Royal Academy elected her Professor of Ancient Literature, an honorary position first instituted in 1770; and in 2016 she was awarded the prestigious Spanish prize, the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences.
Professor Beard is a regular broadcaster and commentator on radio and television, and has written and presented television documentaries on Pompeii and Caligula as well as the highly acclaimed TV series Meet the Romans and Rome—Empire without Limit. Most recently she was a presenter for the BBC landmark Civilisations series and is the presenter of the BBC television arts show Front Row.
Ed Ruscha
There are things that I’m constantly looking at that I feel should be elevated to greater status, almost to philosophical status or to a religious status. That’s why taking things out of context is a useful >tool to an artist. It’s the concept of taking something that’s not subject matter and making it subject matter.
—Ed Ruscha
At the start of his artistic career, Ed Ruscha called himself an “abstract artist … who deals with subject matter”. Abandoning academic connotations that came to be associated with Abstract Expressionism, he looked instead to tropes of advertising and brought words—as form, symbol, and material—to the forefront of painting. Working in diverse media with humor and wit, he oscillates between sign and substance, locating the sublime in landscapes both natural and artificial.
In 1956, Ruscha moved from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute. During his time in art school, he came across a reproduction of Jasper Johns’s Target with Four Faces (1955). Struck by Johns’s use of readymade images as supports for abstraction, Mr. Ruscha began to consider how he could employ graphics in order to expose painting’s dual-identity as both object and illusion.
For his first word-painting, E. Ruscha (1959), he intentionally miscalculated the space it would take to write his first initial and surname on the canvas, inserting the last two letters, HA, above and indicating the “error” with an arrow. After graduation, Mr. Ruscha began to work for ad agencies, honing his skills in schematic design and considering questions of scale, abstraction, and viewpoint, which became integral to his painting and photography. He produced his first artist’s book Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations—a series of deadpan photographs the artist took while driving on Route 66 from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City—in 1963. Mr. Ruscha since has gone on to create more than a dozen artists’ books, including the 25-foot-long, accordion-folded Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) and his version of Jack Kerouac’s iconic On the Road (2009). Mr. Ruscha also paints trompe-l’oeil bound volumes and alters book spines and interiors with painted words: books in all forms pervade his investigations of language and the distribution of art and information.
Mr. Ruscha’s paintings of the 1960s explore the noise and the fluidity of language. With works such as OOF (1962–63)—which presents the exclamation in yellow block letters on a blue ground—it is nearly impossible to look at the painting without verbalizing the visual. Since his first exhibition with Gagosian in 1993, Mr. Ruscha has had 21 solo exhibitions with the gallery, including Custom-Built Intrigue: Drawings 1974–84 (2017), comprising a decade of reverse-stencil drawings of phrases rendered in pastel, dry pigment, and various edible substances, from spinach to carrot juice. The first retrospective of Mr. Ruscha’s drawings was held in 2004 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Mr. Ruscha continues to influence contemporary artists worldwide, his formal experimentations and clever use of the American vernacular evolving in form and meaning as technology and Internet platforms alter the essence of human communication. Mr. Ruscha represented the United States at the 51st Biennale di Venezia (2005) with Course of Empire, an installation of 10 paintings. Inspired by 19th-century American artist Thomas Cole’s famous painting cycle of the same name, the work alludes to the pitfalls surrounding modernist visions of progress. In 2018 Mr. Ruscha’s Course of Empire was presented concurrently with Mr. Cole’s at the National Gallery in London.