PST Art & Science Collide in Los Angeles

This weekend, following a full week of press conferences that drew journalists from all over the region, the country and the world, PST ART: Art & Science Collide launched. Pacific Standard Time (PST) is an initiative of the Getty Museum and its Foundation that over the next five months will see more than 70 related exhibitions at Museums, galleries, and public spaces throughout Southern California from San Diego to Pomona, Riverside, Palm Springs, and Orange County.

This is the third iteration of Pacific Standard Time, which beginning in 2030 will be a once-in-every-five-years event. The first PST, Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980 which opened in October 2011, effectively rewrote the New York-centric art historical narrative to include the importance of Los Angeles and California. If you are looking for an event that began LA's ascension to world art capital, that is it.

In September 2017, the second initiative, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, exploring the connections between Los Angeles and Latin American art and Latino artists in LA, was held. More than 70 art institutions held related exhibitions, which were significant in recognizing Latin American artists and the influence of Latin American heritage and culture, but which did not gain the traction among the public that the first PST did.

Fun PST fact: Dr. Kathryn Fleming, the Getty's President and CEO told us at the press conference that the name of initiative was changed from Pacific Standard Time to PST because when you googled the former what you got was the time not the art event.

Now, with nearly $20 Million in grants from the Getty Foundation, PST: Art and Science will be the largest art event in the United States, with more than 70 cultural institutions participating over the next five months.

Over the last weekend I attended previews of more than a dozen of the exhibitions. Many of the museums have gathered treasures from their collection to put on display, many of which have not been seen by the public before; others have received extraordinary loans of items which have never before left their home country.

Over the next several months, I will be writing about several of the extraordinary offerings on view, but some of what I saw and can already recommend include (in no particular order).

At the Getty Center : The Getty has several exhibitions as well as installations by contemporary artists, all linked by the theme of Light – There is an amazing exhibition of experimental photography, Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography , that begins at the end of the 19th Century, and features Man Ray's Rayographs, and that makes its way to holograms.

Lumen: The Art and Science of Light exhibits more illuminated manuscripts than I have ever seen in one room; and there is a mind-blowing installation of a work by Helen Pashgian that defies logic – and that is not all of the exhibits at The Getty.

At LACMA , there is an amazing show, We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art which features treasures that have never traveled outside of Mexico; and a show on the technologies that allowed for various iterations of video art that I found thought provoking.

One of my favorites among the shows I previewed is an installation, Mark Dion: Excavations , at the La Brea Tar Pits Museum. Dion immersed himself in all aspects of the work of the museum, and eventually produced detailed works that appear as drawings of fossils that Dion has created to detail taxonomies of Los Angeles, including of LA bands, neighborhoods, celebrities... in ways that are idiosyncratic, funny, and will no doubt provoke differences of opinion.

The Hammer has an ambitious show, Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice , curated by artist Glenn Kaino and curator Mika Yoshitake and featuring artists Brandon Ballengée, Mel Chin, Tiffany Chung, Ron Finley, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Ryoji Ikeda, ikkibawiKrrr, Michael Joo, Danil Krivoruchko, Xin Liu, Yoshitomo Nara, Otobong Nkanga, Roxy Paine, Garnett Puett, Rob Reynolds, Sandy Rodriguez, Sarah Rosalena, Bently Spang, Mika Tajima, Clarissa Tossin, Lan Tuazon, Yangkura, Jin-me Yoon, Zheng Mahler.

Among the PST offerings are exhibitions at The Griffith Observatory, CalTech, the Natural History Museum, The Broad, MOCA, The Autry, The Wende, the San Diego Museum of Art and the museums at UC Riverside. UC Irvine, and UCLA, the Birch Aquarium at Scripps, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, SciArc, Art Center Pasadena, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The Academy Museum and the Hammer each have their own film series looking at science fiction film depictions of the near future. And that, too, is not a complete list but gives you some idea of the breadth of the initiative.

Among gallery shows, I will mention just two: Lita Albuquerque: Earth Skin at Michael Kohn Gallery and Thom Mayne: Shaping Accident at LA Louver. Albuquerque , who I recently profiled for Alta Journal is showing new work that is amazing, full of movement, canvases where the gestural paint swooshes seem to be dancing themselves. Thom Mayne is the award-winning architect who has recently begun to show the art he creates. These are just two, but there are also PST-related shows at galleries all over Los Angeles including at Pace LA, Kordansky and many, many others.

In addition to the exhibitions there will be public programming over the next five months where scientists and artists will engage in conversations, reaffirming that, as Michael Govan said recently and as I have often written, Los Angeles is the creative capital of the world and an ongoing hub for innovation in both art and science.

The question hovering over all this is: Will it work? How do we measure success? We will have to wait and see. But the timing seems good: LA now has the art schools, the artists, the museums, galleries both international and local and the collectors that make for a vibrant art ecosystem. Science, most notably, as concerns AI, is top of mind and we are all tethered to our electronic devices. Los Angeles itself is gearing up for the World Cup in 2026 and the Olympics in 2028. For PST ART: Art and Science Collide, the time is now.

As Marcel Duchamp, the father of conceptual art who had his own notable moments in LA, once said: "What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see that is art; art is the gap."