Getty inaugurates PST ART Climate Impact Program – A Groundbreaking Collaboration for Climate Action Within the Museum Field

Los Angeles, CA, April 23, 2024—Continuing Earth Day celebrations, Getty today announced the inauguration of a Climate Impact Program for the largest art event in the United States, PST ART (formerly known as Pacific Standard Time). Returning on September 15 with the theme of Art & Science Collide, PST ART brings together more than 60 exhibiting institutions throughout Southern California, offering an opportunity at an unprecedented scale for institutions to build community, unite in climate action, and test and study sustainable exhibition practices while fostering collaboration on minimizing environmental impact within the museum field.

“The effects of climate change are increasingly part of our daily lives, and are all around us,” said Katherine E. Fleming, President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust. “Many of the exhibitions in Art & Science Collide underscore the magnitude of the climate crisis and also the ways we can engage as change-makers. Indeed, the presenting institutions throughout Southern California will bethe proving ground behind the scenes for diverse, data-driven sustainability practices that have the potential to alter the arts and culture sector at large.”

Getty is making the PST ART Climate Impact Program available to all PST ART partners who are presenting exhibitions by offering webinars about local and global efforts to stage art exhibitions more sustainably; direct consulting with experts to help PST ART project teams identify where they can have the most impact; and guidance for organizations as they implement a wide variety of emissions-saving and waste-cutting initiatives. Additionally, the program encourages partner institutions to complete a Climate Impact Report for their PST ART exhibition. This report delves into the environmental footprint of the exhibition, offering a data-driven analysis of emissions from travel and shipping, waste from fabrication and construction, and worker and community engagement. Funded by Getty, the Climate Impact Program is led by LHL Consulting.

“As trusted institutions, museums have the power to support the health and resilience of their communities while showcasing creative climate leadership through thoughtful, responsible exhibition preparation and presentation,” said Laura Lupton, Founder and Principal of LHL Consulting. “PST ART provides a singular framework to help museums build climate fluency; measure, improve, and report their impacts; and work collaboratively to support a healthier, more sustainable region. Getty is creating a model of leadership and cross-sector support in Southern California that can be replicated across the country and around the world.”

In addition to offering trainings on the nuts and bolts of measuring and managing the climate impact of exhibitions, LHL Consulting is leading programming on how to build engagement around climate conscious institutional practices—including fostering buy-in among boards, executive leaders, and colleagues. Organizations participating in the Climate Impact Program have also been provided with opportunities for climate fluency training for their staff, individual consultations to set and meet project based goals, and data-backed recommendations to support meaningful change.

“There has been a growing desire for the art world to take ownership of its impact, and as a result we're seeing more willingness than ever to rethink systems and habits” said Kelsey Shell, Environmental & Sustainability Strategist at MOCA. “The Climate Impact Program has helped bring more people into the conversation, connecting peer organizations around this work. I'm excited to see where this collaboration leads."

Alongside the Climate Impact Program, Getty is also supporting Gallery Climate Coalition to update its carbon calculator, a tool that allows institutions to measure, understand, and reduce carbon emissions related to key areas of impacts in the sector, such as shipping, travel, and materials. The tool will allow organizations to target their actions by measuring environmental impacts, ensuring they can most effectively cut emissions in line with reduction targets.

Under the umbrella of the Climate Impact Program, PST ART projects are:

• Piloting methods to reduce institutional energy use, such as 

o The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) is piloting wider climate control parameters at the Geffen Contemporary for the run of Olafur Eliasson’s PST ART exhibition. This effort aims to reduce building energy use and is supported by the installation of a new Digital Energy Management System.

o The Hammer Museum is piloting the new international Bizot Green Guidelines, expanded climate condition standards for gallery temperature and humidity based on recent conservation research. Adoption of these updated protocols will significantly reduce the Hammer’s HVAC energy use, the largest component of its carbon footprint.

• Planning ahead to reduce impact, such as

o Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) took advantage of a consolidated ground shipment that came earlier this year for the Frieze LA art fair to transport works for its PST ART exhibition. Too often, special exhibitions have depended upon dedicated shipments for art works, a carbon intensive practice.

o The Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) is prioritizing artist residencies, with new artworks created on site in Long Beach to reduce the need for object transportation.

• Thoughtfully approaching exhibition build practices, such as

o The Huntington is including sustainability criteria in its exhibition design, from sourcing green materials for the build to reusing casework and frames for display.

o Fulcrum Arts sourced climate responsible materials for their build out, including choices of plywood, insulation and acoustic dampening products.

Getty will extend the reach of this work in 2025 by partnering with Gallery Climate Coalition to present a major conference in Los Angeles on the latest thinking in environmental responsibility for museums and the broader art community. This event will allow museums and galleries in Southern California to not only report on the outcomes of their climate actions for PST ART but also come together with leading experts to generate new ideas to tackle critical environmental issues. The summit will be a landmark event that unites the Southern Californian visual arts community, generating confidence, clarity, and most importantly accelerating urgent and effective climate action.

Exhibitions and Programs Addressing Climate Solutions

More than twenty institutions—nearly one-third of PST ART participants—will present exhibitions and programs for Art & Science Collide centered on the climate crisis and its potential solutions. Tenets of ecofeminism and Indigenous knowledge, speculative insights from science fiction, and discoveries of contemporary science variously inform projects on agriculture and industrialization, forests and oceans, and humans and animals.

Select exhibitions include:

• Plants, Wildlife, and the Natural World

o Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time, and Technology at Skirball Cultural Center

o Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History

o Excavations at La Brea Tar Pits

o From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments at the Armory Center for the Arts

o Social Forest: Oaks of Tovaangar at the Broad

o World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project at the California African American Museum

• Climate Solutions

o Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice at the Hammer Museum

o Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art at the Fowler Museum at UCLA

o Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work at La Jolla Historical Society, California Center for the Arts Escondido, San Diego Public Library Gallery, and Mandeville Art Gallery at UC San Diego

o Life on Earth: Art and Ecofeminism at LAXART

o Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean at Oceanside Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, and Crystal Cove Conservancy

o Views of Planet City presented by SCI-Arc at the Pacific Design Center

• Industrialization and the Environment

o Brackish Water Los Angeles at CSU Dominguez Hills University Art Gallery

o Sinks: Places We Call Home presented by Self Help Graphics & Art at Luckman Gallery at Cal State LA

o Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

o We Place Life at the Center / Situamos la Vida en El Centro at Vincent Price Art Museum

Select programs include:

• A season of workshops, conversations, and community events from Crenshaw Dairy Mart around its abolitionist pods—autonomously irrigated, solar-powered gardens in geodesic domes, designed by the Inglewood-based arts non-profit to serve communities across LA County.

• A program at the Skirball Cultural Center featuring young climate activists, poets, and artists who bring an intersectional approach to combatting the devastating effects of climate change.

• A large-scale youth summit on sustainability and climate change at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

Learn more about PST ART climate action at pst.art/climate.

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The PST ART Climate Impact Program is made available by Getty to all PST ART partners presenting exhibitions for Art & Science Collide. The program is led by LHL Consulting, an incubator for ideas that center art, climate, and our collective future. Learn more at climateconsulting.art.

About PST ART: Art & Science Collide

Southern California’s landmark arts event Pacific Standard Time—now PST ART—returns in September 2024 with more than 60 exhibitions from museums and other institutions across the region, all exploring the intersections of art and science—past, present, and future. Dozens of cultural, scientific, and community organizations will join the latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, to share groundbreaking research, create indelible experiences for the public, and generate new ways of understanding our complex world.

PST ART: Art & Science Collide follows Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (September 2017–January 2018) and Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 (October 2011– March 2012). PST ART is presented by Getty. Lead partners are Bank of America, Alicia Miñana & Rob Lovelace, Getty Patron Program. The principal partner is Simons Foundation. 

Media Contacts

Polskin Arts

Meagan Jones / meagan.jones@finnpartners.com / (212) 593-6485

Ruth Frankel / ruth.frankel@finnpartners.com / (646) 213-7249