Just Be Patient

my name is: Sam Taylor

I make: Music and radio

What inspires me about the Getty: It’s peaceful, it’s quiet; there are places where you can get away from people. You can settle in and not worry about what else is going on around you. I found this little spot.

To me, inspiration is: Sometimes it’s a thing that comes to you. Sometimes it’s a thing you work out for a really, really long time. Inspiration is something you’re actively constructing. It’s not something that falls out of the sky, but it could be a moment where things begin to make sense. It’s a product of hours and hours of thought. And sometimes it’s a mistake, a mistake that works for some reason.

If inspiration were an animal, it would be a sloth. Because you have to be really patient and know it’ll get where it’s going to go, but you have to wait.

Listen to the mix tape Sam was editing at the Getty »

People and Ideas

my name is: Jim Cuno

i make: Collaboration

As a high schooler Jim Cuno was a football star. Today he’s president and CEO of the Getty Trust—which means he works with over 1,000 colleagues to make the world a better place through art, from conserving cultural heritage around the world to building our art and archives. What both roles have in common is an emphasis on teamwork.

There are two aspects to his job, Jim explains: people and ideas. “There’s a constant renewal of inspiration by working with these brilliant people,” he says of the Getty community, which includes our staff as well as visiting scholars and artists who enrich our campus life throughout the year. “I’m better working with them than I am alone.”

The other is thinking, reading, and writing. “Writing is like building something…the craftsmanship is a perpetual source of inspiration from one sentence to the next. It’s the doing things that makes it work for me.”

Meet Jim and hear what moves him to make a difference in the world in this #GettyInspired video.

Read Jim’s 2015 year in review »