PST ART: Art & Science Collide Begins with More Than 70 Thematically Linked Exhibitions Opening Throughout Southern California

PST ART: Art & Science Collide, the largest art event in the United States, will begin on Sunday, September 15, 2024. More than 70 thematically linked exhibitions and dozens of public programs, supported by more than $20 million in grants from Getty, will open at institutions throughout Southern California, from San Diego to Santa Barbara and from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, where for five months they will invite the public to explore the intersections of art and science. Topics of the unprecedented collaboration range from biotechnology to sustainable agriculture, from ancient cosmologies to Indigenous sci-fi, and from artificial intelligence to environmental justice.

“PST ART was born of institutions, large and small, coming together in the realization that some of the most vital and compelling subjects in the arts, the ones with the potential to alter our fundamental understanding of the world, are simply too vast for any one institution to address,” said Katherine E. Fleming, President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust. “Now PST ART takes on its most ambitious subject yet: Art & Science Collide.”

“Southern California has both a distinctive, perpetually innovative art scene and one of the most important scientific communities in the world,” said Joan Weinstein, Director of the Getty Foundation. “When we invited institutions throughout the region to join in Art & Science Collide, they responded with dozens of projects that spark curiosity and speak to urgent, real-world concerns: climate change, artificial intelligence, bioengineering, environmental justice, and more. Audiences will now see the work of more than 800 artists and the myriad ways art and science have interacted throughout time and up to the present moment.”

PST ART: Art & Science Collide will begin with a commissioned, arena-scale pyrotechnicevent by Cai Guo-Qiang. Titled WE ARE: Explosion Event for PST ART and conceived by the artist in collaboration with his custom AI model cAITM (pronounced AI Cai), the event will feature the artist- invented daytime fireworks and engage more than one thousand aerial drones around, above, and inside the historic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. WE ARE is presented by Getty in collaboration with the University of Southern California.

Exhibitions

Teams of curators, scientists, and artists have spent years immersed in research and exhibition development supported by Getty grants. The total number of artists represented in the exhibitions now stands at more than 800, from ancient sculptors and 14th-century Islamic scribes to contemporary artists such as Mel Chin, Carolina Caycedo, Olafur Eliasson, Nancy Baker Cahill, Cannupa Hanska Luger, and Tavares Strachan.

Artworks presented in Art & Science Collide range from contemporary installations, videos, films, and immersive environments to mid-20th-century US abstract paintings and sculpture, South American computer-based art from 1960s and 1970s, ancient Aboriginal drawings from Australia, Mesoamerican vessels and textiles, medieval Islamic illustrated books, Chinese hanging scrolls, and 19th-century British Romantic paintings.

The PST ART partners include civic institutions such as LACMA, the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, and the San Diego Museum of Art; independent art museums such as The Broad and MOCA; leading academic institutions including the California Institute of Technology and SCI-Arc; university-affiliated museums and galleries such as the Hammer Museum and Fowler Museum at UCLA and UCR Arts at UC Riverside; organizations working at the convergence of contemporary art, science, and education including Fathomers and the Beall Center for Art + Technology at UC Irvine; and world-renowned scientific institutions, such as Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

A complete list of partner institutions and their exhibitions may be found here.

Performing Arts and Public Programs

Bringing PST ART beyond gallery walls, an ambitious slate of programs and events will offer audiences in Southern California numerous pathways to experience, and participate in, what is now the nation’s largest arts initiative. Partner institutions including the LA Phil, REDCAT, and Caltech are presenting concerts, performances, and workshops at a variety of indoor and outdoor spaces throughout Southern California, including Balboa Park (SanDiego), Willowbrook Community Garden, and the United Theater on Broadway. Grants from the Getty have also made these programs possible.

The vast array of programs includes:

• A runway fashion show at Getty Center, presented in collaboration with the Autry Museum, featuring futuristic creations by Indigenous designers

• A commemorative rocket launch of a replica of the Sputnik satellite presented by the Wende Museum

• An edition of Noon to Midnight, LA Phil’s festival of new music, dedicated to the practice of field recording, with the world premiere of Doug Aitken’s multimedia artwork Lightscape as its centerpiece

• An evening of deep-space communication hosted by comedian Reggie Watts and organized by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

• Programs on climate change for youth activists at Skirball Cultural Center and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

Getty will join with the internationally renowned Edinburgh Science organization to present a free, outdoor PST ART: Art x Science Family Festival at La Brea Tar Pits over the November 9 through 11 holiday weekend. The outdoor festival will offer participatory hands-on workshops, roving demonstrations, a full slate of performances, and a celebratory atmosphere with music and food. Activities include imagining distant exoplanets with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, practicing traditional adobe building techniques with Craft Contemporary, and performing surgery on life- like anatomical dummies. Other family-friendly PST ART programming will be presented as part of “community hubs” across Los Angeles County organized by LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, Lancaster Museum of Art and History, and LA Commons.

PST ART Weekends will break up the map into smaller regions perfect for exhibition-hopping, including Northeast LA & Pasadena, West LA to South LA, Orange County & Long Beach, Hollywood to Expo Park, San Diego & La Jolla, and Downtown LA. These regional weekends also feature evenings with local vendors, special performances, and DJs selected by global radio platform NTS Radio.

Education Programs

PST ART: Art & Science Collide is complemented by a robust group of education programs. Getty grants to the LA Promise Fund and the Greater Los Angeles Education Foundation have enabled outreach to school districts and teachers and the creation of education programs for schools throughout Los Angeles City and County over a nine-month period, from August 2024 through May 2025. These include online learning resources and lesson plans, professional development for teachers, and family visits to PST ART: Art & Science Collide exhibitions. Overseen by LA Promise Fund, these programs will support participation in Art & Science Collide by the district’s most underserved schools. Additional online learning resources have been created for Art & Science Collide by Getty Museum’s Education Department.

Many PST ART partners have also contributed University-level curricular resources. Materials include curatorial perspectives on key objects in particular PST ART exhibitions,suggested discussion questions, and bibliographic sources.

Climate Impact Program

The PST ART Climate Impact Program is a groundbreaking integration of climate action, community building, and data reporting as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide.

The Climate Impact Program has provided partner organizations with education, resources, and tools to build community and take lasting climate action, as well as a framework for completing climate impact reports related to their PST ART exhibitions. The program’s objectives are to build climate fluency among Southern California arts professionals, unite climate action across partner sites, and collect climate impact reports to create a data-backed regional understanding of the collective climate impact of exhibition-making in the Southern California arts and culture sector. Climate action and reporting at partner sites is self-directed and voluntary, with a majority of partner organizations participating.

The Climate Impact Program is led by LHL Consulting and is made available to all PST ART partners presenting exhibitions for Art & Science Collide.

Participating Gallery Program

Through PST ART’s Participating Gallery Program, more than 40 rising and established galleries in Downtown Los Angeles, Culver City, Santa Monica, Hollywood, West Hollywood, and beyond will offer group and solo exhibitions, artist-curated projects, and installations that explore urgent topics ranging from climate change and environmental justice to the future of artificial intelligence and alternative medicine.

Exhibitions will include a reexamination of Jeffrey Deitch’s prescient 1992 exhibition Post Human; a presentation of Betye Saar’s monumental altar assemblage Mojotech (1987) at Roberts Projects; and, at Various Small Fires, an exhibition dedicated to Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, whose work imagined possibilities for ecological repair. Solo artist exhibitions include Elise Rasmussen at Night Gallery and Torkwase Dyson at Pace Gallery, among many others.

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Press materials in English and Spanish are available here.

IMAGES (L to R):
1. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Storm Prototype No. 2, 2006. Fiberglass and aluminum alloy foil. 57 1/4 × 96 5/8 × 60 1/2 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
2. Light experiments for the exhibition Olafur Eliasson: OPEN at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 2024. Photo by Henri Lacoste | Studio Olafur Eliasson. Courtesy of the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; neugerriemschneider, Berlin © 2024 Olafur Eliasson.
3. Detail of Torus, 2021; exhibition copy 2023, Deana Lawson (American, born 1979). Transmission hologram mounted to glass Plate: 28.6 × 39.1 × 1.6 cm (111/4 × 15 3/8 × 5/8 in.). Courtesy of the artist, Gagosian, New York, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. © Deana Lawson. Photo: Matthew Schreiber.

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