July 2020 – Art + Ideas

Reflections: Johnny Tran on Pueblo del Rio

Getty Art + Ideas

Reflections: Johnny Tran on Pueblo del Rio

00:00 / 3:15

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives.

This week, Johnny Tran relates deeply to the joy of a family gathered around the dinner table and considers the importance of beautiful public housing to Black Angelenos in the 1940s. He discusses a photograph of architect Paul R. Williams’s Pueblo del Rio project from Leonard Nadel’s unpublished book Pueblo Del Rio: A Study of a Planned Community. To learn more about this photograph, visit: rosettaapp.getty.edu/delivery/Deliv…s_pid=FL218644.

Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every other Tuesday.

Transcript

JAMES CUNO: Hi, I’m Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust. In a new podcast feature, we’re asking members of the Getty community to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. We’ll be releasing new recordings every other Tuesday. I hope you’ll find these stories about our daily lives—from laundry on the line to a dog at a scholar’s feet—thought provoking, illuminating, and entertaining.

JOHNNY TRAN: Hi I’m Johnny Tran from the curatorial department of the Getty Research Institute.

Due to COVID-19, I decided to move back to my childhood home, in Anaheim, California to be with my parents and sister. And moving back I realized just how lucky I was to have the option of going back home to be with family in these difficult times. That’s something my immigrant parents didn’t really have a chance to do, and it got me thinking about what makes a home a home.

I work primarily with our architecture and design collections. And in these recent months, I find myself coming back to this unpublished book that we have in the archives called Pueblo Del Rio: A Study of a Planned Community. There are stunning photographs in this book, but there is one in particular, of a woman named Bessie Samuel and her family and that just pulls me back every time.

It’s an image of a Black family sharing a meal in their new modern kitchen. It’s an sort of everyday sort of scene. However, for the Samuel family, it takes a lot of effort to get to this moment.

The Samuels called Pueblo del Rio their home. It’s a public housing project in the South Central area of Los Angeles, and the designs were led by actually the most renowned African American architect, Paul Williams. Built in the early 1940s, it was primarily for African American defense workers. This was a time when LA was highly segregated, there are very few housing options available, particularly for people of color.

By the late 1940s Leonard Nadel, an American photographer, was hired to document the public housing projects like Pueblo Del Rio. You see Nadel’s skill and not only documenting the really beautiful functional modernist design of the house. But you see the everyday life, the people who live in these buildings, like the Samuel family.

It makes me appreciate the steps that my parents took to have a home, and these little family moments that I get to have with them. Like every night when we have dinner.

It also makes me realize just how far we still have to go and the enormous changes and challenges we face to provide housing for underserved communities. Pueblo del Rio was a positive step forward, and I realize it takes community engagement and government action to achieve this.

I love this quote that Nadel ends the book with, from Franklin Roosevelt: “We have accepted a second bill of rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all. Regardless of station, race, or creed. Among these are the right of every American for a decent home.”

CUNO: To view Leonard Nadel’s photographs of Paul R. William’s Pueblo del Rio from the late 1940s, click the link in this episode’s description or look for it on primo.getty.edu

International Museum Directors on COVID-19 and Collaboration, Part 2

Getty Art + Ideas

International Museum Directors on COVID-19 and Collaboration, Part 2

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Art institutions around the world responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by closing their doors and rethinking planned exhibitions, programming, and partnerships. Now, a few months into the crisis, museums are beginning to reopen, but they are also reevaluating what the next few years might bring and how they might continue to work collaboratively.

The pandemic hit just as the Getty was beginning to partner with museums in Mumbai, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Berlin on its Ancient Worlds Now initiative, a ten-year project dedicated to the study, presentation, and conservation of the world’s ancient cultures.

In this episode, Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum, joins Yang Zhigang, director of the Shanghai Museum, and Andreas Scholl, director of the Altes Museum, Antikensaammlung, Collection of Classical Antiquities, in Berlin. They discuss their responses to COVID-19 and their hopes for the future of the Ancient Worlds Now initiative.

For images, transcripts, and more, visit getty.edu/podcasts.

Reflections: Larisa Grollemond on a July Calendar

Getty Art + Ideas

Reflections: Larisa Grollemond on a July Calendar

00:00 / 2:43

We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives.

This week, curator Larisa Grollemond thinks about how calendars link us to the middle ages. To learn more about this artwork, visit: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/3500/.

Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every other Tuesday.

Transcript

LARISA GROLLEMOND: I’m Larisa Grollemond, assistant curator of manuscripts at the Getty.

When we first started working from home back in March, what now seems like really an eternity ago, I started keeping track of time by counting off the weeks. I eventually stopped around week 13 or so, but I think, as many of us have experienced, there are lots of different ways that we mark time: walking the dogs, eating meals, your 100^th zoom call of the week. So I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways that medieval people marked time.

And as the months passed by, how all of the seasonal markers that we rely on to keep track of time passing seem even more important. This is a calendar page for July from a Book of Hours, which was the kind of manuscript that many medieval people relied on as a guide to daily prayer. They often also have these calendar pages which are really practical as well as often really beautifully illuminated. And this one shows a list of saints’ days in alternating colors, sort of like the holidays would be marked for us on a normal wall calendar. Memorial Day, Passover, the Fourth of July.

These are also often decorated with seasonal markers, usually something like an agricultural chore that you’d have to do during that time of year. Here for July, you can see a man and woman pictured at the bottom of the page reaping wheat, and it must be really hot. The man’s legs are bare and the woman’s over skirt has been pulled up. They both look like they could really use a break.

Even though probably not many of us are reaping wheat, I think I feel a new connection to the person who must have used this calendar to find their place in time, as the days feel both interminably long and weirdly compressed at the same time, and watching all the hallmarks of the seasons passing that we’ve come to expect come and go. And I think that the predictability and regularity of a calendar is reassuring. It’s kind of heartening to think that July in France in the early 15th century when this manuscript was made might have felt like July in Los Angeles in 2020.

CUNO: To view this July calendar page from the workshop of the Bedford Master, made in Paris, France, around 1440 to 1450, click the link in this episode’s description or look for it on getty.edu/art/collection.

International Museum Directors on COVID-19 and Collaboration, Part 1

Getty Art + Ideas

International Museum Directors on COVID-19 and Collaboration, Part 1

00:00 / 47:07

The pandemic hit just as Getty was beginning to partner with museums in Mumbai, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Berlin on its Ancient Worlds Now initiative, a ten-year project dedicated to the study, presentation, and conservation of the world’s ancient cultures.

In this episode, Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum, joins Sabyasachi Mukherjee, director general of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai, and Antonio Saborit, director of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, to discuss their responses to COVID-19 and their hopes for the future of the Ancient Worlds Now initiative.

For images, transcripts, and more, visit getty.edu/podcasts.

Reflections: Idurre Alonso on the Natural History of Brazil

Getty Art + Ideas

Reflections: Idurre Alonso on the Natural History of Brazil

00:00 / 3:26

We’ve asked curators from the Getty Museum and Getty Research Institute to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives.

This week, curator Idurre Alonso imagines a trip to the lush Brazilian landscape through an illustration in a 1648 book. To learn more about this artwork, visit: http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cat_ALMA2113047222000155.

Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every Tuesday.

JAMES CUNO: Hello, I’m Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust. As we all adapt to working and living under these new and unusual circumstances, we’ve asked curators from the Getty Museum and Getty Research Institute to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. We’ll be releasing new recordings on Tuesdays over the next few weeks. I hope you’ll find these stories about our daily lives—from laundry on the line to a dog at a scholar’s feet—thought provoking, illuminating, and entertaining.

IDURRE ALONSO: Hi, my name is Idurre Alonso and I work as curator of Latin American collections at the Getty Research Institute.

So I chose this image, which is the frontispiece of a book called Natural History of Brazil, written by Willem Piso in 1648, as I was thinking how we’re basically trapped in our houses. And we can’t get out and we can’t travel. And so thinking on how this image takes me to, to a place in Brazil almost this idyllic place, almost like paradise. With this very lush nature, and I would like to be there.

And what I like about it is that you have all these different elements, [it] is full of details that talk about how many different species, new species, and new trees and new fruits were found in Latin America. One of the elements that I really love are the monkeys in the top part, holding the banner with the title of the book. And I also love this sloth climbing into the tree in the right part. And of course, then you have the couple, the indigenous couple, which is depicted in a very classical, conventional way.

And all these depictions in this print is referencing paradise, the biblical passage of paradise. And so instead of having Adam and Eve, then you have this couple. You can see this snake climbing, instead of a tree, well it is a tree, it is a palm tree. So using a local tree from Latin America.

Looking at all these elements, I think about how much I would like to be in a place like this. And I also think about what is the other side of, of this print. This idyllic image contrasts with a reality of what actually happened during the colonial time, how indigenous groups were decimated and forced to convert to Catholicism, and how also natural resources were heavily extracted many times by enslaved people.

So those are all the things that I that I can think of when I, when I look at this image and imagine myself there while I’m sitting in my sofa here in Los Angeles.

CUNO: To learn more about Willem Piso’s Historia naturalis Brasiliae, published in 1648, click the link in this episode’s description or look for it on primo.getty.edu