Multi-venue, Southern California
Closes 16 February 2025
The myth of the irreconcilably divided worlds of art and science is still alive. But it’s nonsense, says Joan Weinstein, director of the Getty Foundation – the two have always been intertwined. She stresses this in her role as chief architect of , a programme of over 70 exhibitions in Southern California over the next three months designed to interrogate the bonds between the two.
In 2017, Weinstein began talking to museum directors about the theme. “Everyone started sparking to the idea,” she recalls. It was at a time when scepticism of science was on the rise – not long after the first election of Donald Trump.
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The largest art event in the US, PST Art is supported by over $20 million from the Getty Foundation, distributed to institutions ranging from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to small, regional galleries. Weinstein says the project’s strengths are a “multiplicity of voices” and a breadth of themes, such as Indigenous knowledge, scientific futurism, environmental justice and climate change.
The festival is timely. From her office in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Weinstein points to a skyline bathed in a haze: “That is smog, that is pollution.” Appropriately, at the Hammer Museum, an affiliate of the University of California, Los Angeles, the Breath(e) exhibition will address the lungs of our planet – oceans, forests and the atmosphere. Works include a botanical installation by Los Angeles-based guerrilla gardener Ron Finley and a sculpture by Garnett Puett, created in collaboration with bees.
Scientific progress has shaped Southern California’s recent history, says Weinstein. The technology that came out of the region’s aerospace industries and places like NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was adopted by Hollywood, she notes. Fittingly, the entertainment world is well represented in the project. For example, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is presenting Cyberpunk: Envisioning possible futures through cinema, which explores near-future scenarios.
Weinstein says the project's strengths are a multiplicity of voices and a breadth of themes
And at JPL, artists and staff come together for Blended Worlds: Experiments in interplanetary imagination. One data scientist at JPL believes the collaboration has reframed his work philosophically, according to Weinstein. “You could see how moved he was,” she says.
Elsewhere, academic research drives Growing and Knowing in the Gardens of China at San Marino’s Huntington Library, focusing on the gardens of China’s cultural elite in the 17th century. And at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, visitors explore a medieval obsession in Lumen: The art and science of light.
At the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theatre (REDCAT) in downtown Los Angeles, curators look to the future in All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. The artists are critical of artificial intelligence and their exhibition asks, what if algorithms were written by communities of colour and LGBTQ+ groups?
One of the show’s performances involves Indigenous artist Kite and Mexico City-based collective Interspecifics, bringing together machine-learning technologies, sound, the body and Indigenous cosmologies.
With politically charged themes and claims of greenwashing and artwashing prevalent in the museum world, Weinstein is sensitive to conflicts of interest. Tech companies approached the foundation to collaborate, but were turned down. So, will the festival create arguments in this election year? “I hope so,” she says.
Christian House is a writer based in London
