PST ART: ART & SCIENCE COLLIDE CONCLUDES SIX MONTHS OF THOUGHT-PROVOKING EXHIBITIONS AND PROGRAMS ABOUT THE INTERSECTIONS OF ART AND SCIENCE

Los Angeles, CA, April 10, 2025 – PST ART: Art & Science Collide, the region-wide collaboration initiated by Getty, has concluded after presenting hundreds of exhibitions, programs, and events throughout Southern California over the past six months. With the support of more than $20 million in grants from Getty and five years of research and planning, more than 70 cultural institutions, ranging from small community-based centers to the region’s largest museums, have participated in this unprecedented exploration of the intersections of art and science—past, present, and in the imaginable future.

Nineteen of the exhibitions, including those at LACMA, La Brea Tar Pits, The Wende, and the Fowler Museum at UCLA, are continuing after the official conclusion of PST ART and will remain on view through various dates until April 2026. A list of continuing exhibitions can be found HERE.

Art & Science Collide builds on the long history of exchange between art and science in Southern California, dating back to the earliest years at Caltech and the recognition that science flourishes when it is in dialogue with the arts and humanities. In the century since, the region has seen several scientific institutions, including the Natural History Museum and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, incorporate the arts into their programs. Both reflecting and expanding upon this history in its exhibitions, this latest edition of PST ART offered the public extraordinary new insights into topics ranging from the history of space exploration to sustainable agriculture, from ancient cosmologies to Indigenous sci-fi, and from biotechnology to environmental justice.

“Many of the art movements strongly identified with Southern California are unimaginable without an intense engagement with science,” said Katherine E. Fleming, President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust. “Light and Space artists collaborated with everyone from physicists to brain scientists to create a totally new art form, while digital and media artists have engaged the tech and entertainment industries in transformative ways. PST ART succeeded once again in bringing together Southern California’s distinctive, perpetually innovative art scene, this time in conjunction with one of the most important scientific communities in the world.”

Like past PST ART collaborations, Art & Science Collide has impacted the artistic canon, notably with the largest simultaneous concentration of deeply researched exhibitions devoted to Indigenous knowledge across time periods and cultures. In eight dedicated exhibitions, as well as featured sections in many other PST ART shows and high-profile programming such as the Autry’s Fashioning Indigenous Futurism runway show at Getty curated by Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, the collaboration facilitated conversations about the relationship of Indigenous knowledge to Western sciences. Presentations considered how together they might better address complex issues such as climate change; re-centered ancestral environmental knowledge; and highlighted the work of contemporary Indigenous artists in the vanguard of imagining alternative futures.

This latest collaboration also raised the profiles of up-and-coming artists, cast new light on established figures, saw scientific organizations producing art exhibitions for the first time, and produced new insights into the ever-evolving relationships between art and science.

"Having my work in a number of exhibitions provided an opportunity for me to rethink art and science at a time of multiple crises, from wildfires and climate change to technological acceleration and the continued legacies of colonialism,” said artist Sarah Rosalena, whose work was featured in six exhibitions. “The relationships built over the past five years with PST ART have been crucial to my thinking about collaborative approaches to knowledge-making. I’m thrilled to be able to build on these experiences with a solo exhibition at BLUM this May and a commission for the new LACMA building that will open in 2026.”

The tangible impact of PST ART’s network can also be seen in its Climate Impact Program, which was inaugurated with Art & Science Collide and is set to be an ongoing part of PST ART. The program, funded by Getty and led by LHL Consulting, offers an opportunity at an unprecedented scale for institutions to unite in climate action—testing and studying sustainable exhibition practices and documenting the carbon impact of their exhibitions.

This is the first time institutions in an entire region have worked collaboratively to rethink exhibition practices and their climate impact. Ninety-three percent of eligible institutions took advantage of one-on-one consulting with experts to help identify where they could reduce their carbon footprint, and seventy-two percent of eligible institutions completed Climate Impact Reports for their exhibitions. These reports delve into the environmental footprint of 53 individual exhibitions, resulting in the largest dataset to date for exhibition making.

“With Getty’s commitment to continuing PST ART every five years, we conclude Art & Science Collide with an eye toward 2030,” said Joan Weinstein, Director of the Getty Foundation. “The artistic and scholarly achievements that result from each edition of PST ART are profound and will endure far into the future. So, too, will the spirit of cooperation that PST ART fosters, which in January 2025 was indispensable in mobilizing the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund. We have seen how powerful and resilient we can be when we work together.”

Traveling exhibitions and catalogues

PST ART: Art & Science Collide expands its reach with many of the exhibitions traveling to other venues and with dozens of illustrated catalogues generated through more than five years of planning, research, and collaborative work among hundreds of curators, artists, and scholars.

Traveling exhibitions include San Diego Museum of Art’s Wonders of Creation: Art, Science, and Innovation in the Islamic World, now on view at The McMullen Museum of Art in Boston, MA, through June 1, 2025; The Brick’s Life on Earth: Art and Ecofeminism, now on view at West Den Haag in The Hague, Netherlands, through August 1, 2025; Vincent Price Art Museum’s We Place Life at the Center / Situamos la vida en el centro, open April 3 through July 21, 2025 at the Miguel Urrutia Art Museum in Bogota, Colombia; The Hammer’s Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice, now on view at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts in Houston, TX, through May 10, and later on view at UC Davis in Davis, CA, August 7 through December 2, 2025; LACMA’s We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art, on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO, from November 1, 2025, to February 8, 2026; and Getty Research Institute’s Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), on view at LUMA-Arles in Paris, France, May 1, 2025, through January 11, 2026. Smaller iterations of the Lancaster Museum of Art and History’s Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees will be presented at other venues, including HeyThere Projects in Joshua Tree from May 10 to June 12, 2025.

Catalogues documenting the research behind the groundbreaking exhibitions on view across Southern California leave a permanent legacy of scholarship that ranges in subject matter from surveillance to cyberpunk and from diorama halls to digital art, with a large concentration on art engaging with climate crisis and the natural world. Publications focus on the work of iconic artists such as Beatriz da Costa, Helen and Newton Harrison, and Joseph Beuys, as well as art and science’s relationships with sex and gender, ecological disaster, and social change.

Additional catalogues are forthcoming. Detailed information about the individual publications can be found HERE.

PST ART: Art & Science Collide in review

PST ART: Art & Science Collide launched publicly in May 2023 with an initial round of research grants from the Getty Foundation. These were followed by a second round of grants in October 2023 for public programming, including grants for PST ART Community Hubs, performing arts programs, and a robust K-12 education program. More than $20 million in grants was awarded by Getty to 70+ organizations.

After opening in September 2024, PST ART: Art & Science Collide

• presented works by more than 800 artists from around the world, including North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia.
• engaged the public in more than 70 museums and cultural partners across Southern California, from San Diego to Santa Barbara and from Los Angeles to Palm Springs.
• generated more than 30 exhibition catalogues, with newly unearthed documentation and comprehensive illustrations.
• and involved more than 40 participating commercial galleries throughout Los Angeles through exhibitions, performances, and public programs.

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About PST ART
PST ART (formerly known as Pacific Standard Time) is an unprecedented, large-scale collaboration of cultural, educational, and community organizations each presenting thematically linked exhibitions and programs designed to celebrate Southern California’s cultural history. Art & Science Collide follows Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (September 2017–January 2018), which presented a paradigm-shifting examination of Latin American and Latinx art, and Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 (October 2011–March 2012), which rewrote the history of the birth and impact of the LA art scene.

Now occurring every five years with the next edition slated for 2030, PST ART is presented by Getty.

Lead partners for PST ART: Art & Science Collide are Bank of America, Alicia Miñana & Rob Lovelace, and the Getty Patron Program. Principal partners are Simons Foundation; Eva and Ming Hsieh, Co-Founders of Fulgent Genetics; and Peggy and Andrew Cherng, Co-Chairs and Co-CEOs of Panda Express. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit: pst.art.

Press materials about PST ART are available here.

Media Contacts

Polskin Arts
Meagan Jones / meagan.jones@finnpartners.com / (212) 593-6485
Ruth Frankel / ruth.frankel@finnpartners.com / (646) 213-7249