Gold nose adornments, feather paintings, and beaded shell collars. These are some of the objects featured in the Getty’s current exhibition, “Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas,” which traces the development of luxury arts in the Americas from antiquity to the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century. We visit the galleries with co-curators Joanne Pillsbury, Timothy Potts, and Kim Richter who discuss how the study of objects made of gold, jade, shell, feathers, and other stones from this region reveals different perspectives on value and luxury.
Joanne Pillsbury is the Andrall E. Pearson Curator in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Timothy Potts is director of the J. Paul Getty Museum; and Kim Richter is senior research specialist at the Getty Research Institute.
