Month: October 2018

The Salk Institute Part 1: Founding and Forming

Getty Art + Ideas
Getty Art + Ideas
The Salk Institute Part 1: Founding and Forming
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Shortly after inventing the polio vaccine, scientist Jonas Salk set his sights on another groundbreaking undertaking: creating an institute where science and art could meet and inform each other. In architect Louis Kahn, Salk found a man who not only shared this vision, but who was capable of designing the space to support it. The Salk Institute’s monumental modernist buildings and plaza, located on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, are the result of this collaboration.

In this episode, Jonathan Salk and Nathaniel Kahn, sons of Jonas Salk and Louis Kahn respectively, discuss their fathers’ relationship to each other and to the Salk Institute.

India & the World with curator Naman Ahuja

Getty Art + Ideas
Getty Art + Ideas
India & the World with curator Naman Ahuja
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The exhibition India & the World: A History in Nine Stories has an ambitious goal: to use objects to chronicle cultural, economic, and artistic exchange and influence between India and the world. From four-thousand-year-old seals from the Indus Valley found thousands of miles from where they were created to contemporary works of art made out of money and concrete, the wide-ranging exhibition centers on India to address our shared human experiences.

In this episode, Naman Ahuja, professor of the history of art at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, describes the curatorial process for this multi-venue, multilingual exhibition and touches on some of the key objects on display.

Palmyra: Loss and Remembrance

Getty Art + Ideas
Getty Art + Ideas
Palmyra: Loss and Remembrance
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During its heyday from the first to third centuries CE, the ancient city of Palmyra flourished as a crossroads of Eastern and Western people, goods, and cultures. The unique blend of Eastern and Western influence on Palmyrene society remains visible in the elaborate funerary relief portraits carved to commemorate loved ones. In this episode, we tour an exhibition of Palmyrene funerary portraiture, on loan from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen and Stanford University, with curator of antiquities Ken Lapatin and Getty guest scholar Rubina Raja, who is professor of classical archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark.