The third edition of PST ART, “Art & Science Collide” runs through February 2025. What organizers tout as “the nation’s largest arts initiative” has mushroomed into a galaxy of presentations and programming.
“ARTEONICA: Art, Science, and Technology in Latin America Today” Matrix Vegetal, 2021/22, Patricia Domínguez, at Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA). Commissioned by Screen City Biennial and Cecilia Brunson Projects. Installation at Macalline Art Center, Beijing. © Patricia Domínguez.
Pacific Standard Time–now PST ART
ART–was not supposed to be this. Not all this. When it was first imagined by the Getty Foundation’s Joan Weinstein and her colleague Andrew Perchuk, their vision was for a small, scholarly, archival project focused locally. Very demure, very mindful to use the catchphrase of the moment. “We realized that archives of L.A. artists from the post-World War II period were disappearing,” Weinstein, now Director of the Getty Foundation, told Forbes.com. “This is what the Getty does. We collect archives. We also help other places process and arrange their archives to make them available to scholars. We jumped into that mode, but when we saw how what a different story it told about the development of modern art in this country, we thought, ‘We need to do something about this.’”
So they did. The vision grew. “At first it was just a few exhibitions. We talked to some of the key museums–(Los Angeles County Museum of Art), the Hammer, (Museum of Contemporary Art), and they all said, ‘Oh my God, we've had a passion project that we've wanted to do for so long, but didn't have the resources because it is going to require that kind of deep archival research,’” Weinstein remembers. “We said, ‘Well, we can do that.’”
Then word began to spread. More and more institutions around Los Angeles wanted in. The project expanded further. “We opened (Pacific Standard Time) up to applications, and all of a sudden we had all these applications. We did not set out to create something this large. It happened organically, but after the first one, everyone came together and said, ‘When's the next one?’” Weinstein said. “That's the thing that's really distinctive about Southern California, the institutions are incredibly collaborative. They love working together.”
The third edition of PST ART, titled “Art & Science Collide” runs through February 2025. What organizers now tout as “the nation’s largest arts initiative” has mushroomed into a galaxy of presentations and programming–hundreds of events from concerts to talks, walks, over 70 exhibitions, you name it–across Southern California, expanding beyond Los Angeles all the way to San Diego. Plans are to host one every five years moving forward. “There's this appetite for collaboration in Southern California, so all the institutions want to join in, and they had so many great projects it became hard not to have so many,” Weinstein said. “The other thing was that for this edition, we realized that art and science can sometimes be a difficult topic for people, so we wanted to make sure we had as many entry points into the topic as we could–we did a lot more programming for this edition than we have in past ones.”
That programming kicks off on September 15 with a free, monumental daytime fireworks performance at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum by artist Cai Guo-Qiang. The demure, arty, scholarly, archival initiative–in true L.A. form–has become a big budget spectacle, a summer blockbuster of an art festival.
Art And Science Collide
‘Mark Dion: Excavations’ at La Brea Tar Pits. Studies for ‘Mark Dion: Excavations,’ 2023, Mark Dion. Illustration. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © Mark Dion
Art and science appear unlikely bedfellows. Left brain, right brain. Analytical vs. creative. “When we sat down to figure out what the next collaboration was going to be, we consulted a number of our museum partners, and quickly, the idea of art and science rose to the top,” Weinstein said. “Part of it was that we felt we had established Southern California as an important arts center in the first two editions and we realized that one of the other strengths of the region were the scientific institutions.”
Working out of L.A.’s Mt. Wilson Observatory in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble–namesake of the Hubble Telescope–discovered that the universe was expanding, utterly altering conceptions of it. L.A.’s Griffith Observatory also looks deep into space. Back on earth, just underneath the surface, the La Brea tar pits are the world’s top Ice Age archaeology site. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is based in Los Angeles along with a handful of the nation’s top research universities, not to mention the film industry which continually innovates technologies across a broad spectrum.
The timing was also right. “It was a moment in 2017 where science itself was coming under a lot of pressure–skepticism about science–and also, in some ways, the marginalization of the art world–it's not something real, it’s not something that people know. It's elitist. It's not part of everyday culture. So we thought, what a great way to bring these two things together,” Weinstein said. Since 2017, skepticism of science and marginalization of the art world haven’t slowed.
PST ART Weekends
“Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures” at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). ‘Horoscope from the Book of the Birth of Iskandar, Mahmud ibn Yahya ibn al-Hasan al-Kashi. Digital Image courtesy of The Wellcome Collection’s Open Access Program. © Museum Associates/LACMA
The point of PST ART is not seeing everything–that would be impossible–but offering everyone exposure to the project, inviting everyone, making it easy for everyone to see something. In addition to curated itineraries on the Getty website providing visitors a way to wrap their arms around an event of nearly unimaginable scale, organizers have developed “PST ART Weekends,” mini-PSTs, making PST ART a “festival of festivals.” PST ART Weekends break up the map into regions perfect for exhibition-hopping. These weekends will all feature evenings with local vendors and special performances, along with celebrating a grassroots environmental group that has in some way inspired work on view in “Art & Science Collide.”
Northeast LA & Pasadena (October 4–6)
Friday night features a special outdoor performance by Black Quantum Futurism at the Audubon Center at Debs Park, including a hands-on workshop from USAL Project and NTS Radio DJs, while Saturday and Sunday feature more than fifteen partner events in galleries, on stage, and off the LA River.
West LA to South LA (October 19–20)
A day-long Saturday event at Crenshaw Dairy Mart, also featuring special activations by LACE, will be followed by an evening block party at the Wende Museum, with a record store pop-up by In Sheep’s Clothing Hi-Fi, local food trucks, Art & Science Collide programs, and more.
Orange County & Long Beach (November 2)
With an emphasis on the Pacific Ocean and regional waterways, this weekend will feature workshops and events at the Orange County Museum of Art, Oceanside Museum of Art, Crystal Cove State Park, Cal State Dominguez Hills Art Gallery, and Fulcrum Arts at Chapman University, as well as Laguna Art Museum’s 12th annual Art + Nature initiative.
Over Veteran’s Day weekend, November 9–11, Getty joins with the internationally renowned Edinburgh Science organization to present a free, outdoor PST ART: Art x Science Family Festival at La Brea Tar Pits. Guests can enjoy hands-on workshops, demonstrations, performances, music and food geared toward children ages 4 to 14 and their families. Additional hands-on family activities at the festival will take place at the nearby Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, LACMA, and Craft Contemporary.
Hollywood to Expo Park (November 16–17)
PST ART’s unofficial “performance weekend” will include “A Day of Quantum Listening” with flutist Claire Chase and guests at the Ebell of Los Angeles; performances at Barnsdall Art Park from LA Dance Project, and the opening of NHM Commons at the Natural History Museum.
San Diego & La Jolla (November 23–24)
Balboa Park’s partners (San Diego Museum of Art, Mingei, and ICA San Diego) will co-host a Saturday cross-park activation with music and hands-on workshops.
At night, MCA San Diego will stay open late with DJs and drinks.
Downtown LA (December 7–8): REDCAT and UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance will close out the PST ART Weekends with “Live Night: Cruising Bodies, Spirits and Machines.” Other programs will take place at the Downtown Public Library, in the laboratory environment built by Fathomers at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, and in the galleries at MOCA.
PST ART Highlights
Aerial view of the Getty center, art museum in Los Angeles, California, USA. Getty
Programming connected to PST ART runs the gamut from the unexpected–a reinstallation of L.A. icon Betye Saar’s monumental altar assemblage, Mojotech, created in 1987 during the artist’s residency at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, fusing contemporary technology and the mystique of ancient spirituality–to the downright bizarre–as part of LACE’s re-creation of the late artist Beatriz da Costa’s PIGEONBLOG, first in South LA (October 19) and then in and around Los Feliz (November 16), the skies of Los Angeles will be monitored for air quality by pigeons wearing tiny sensor-equipped backpacks.
On September 28 and 29 from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM free with a reserved, timed ticket, Lita Albuquerque recreates her Malibu Line temporary blue pigment earthwork. The work will be installed on the site of Albuquerque’s former home which was destroyed by the Woolsey Fire in 2018.
Six leading Indigenous fashion designers—Jason Baerg, Orlando Dugi, Jontay Kahm, Caroline Monnet, Jamie Okuma, and Virgil Ortiz—will present their work on a runway at the Getty Center on September 30. The show will celebrate the artists’ blend of innovative couture, ancestral knowledge, and future-forward style. This one-night-only event will bring to life looks on view at the Autry Museum’s “Art & Science Collide” exhibition “Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology.”
On October 4, the Wende Museum revisits yesterday’s future when it re-creates the event that initiated the Space Age: the launch into orbit of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik on October 4, 1957. Designed and launched by participants in Stanford University’s Student Space Initiative, the satellite, like Sputnik itself, will send data back to Earth.
In San Diego, the New Children’s Museum will host free family workshops throughout the fall inspired by science fiction author Octavia E. Butler. Butler is also the focus during a collaboration between American Artist and LACMA Art + Technology Lab on November 3 for an event looking at the legacy of her writings, particularly the 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, which unfolds in the imagined dystopian year of 2024. Drawing parallels between Butler’s fictional U.S. presidential race and the impending real-world election, the event will also feature Amazon Labor Union founder Chris Smalls, planetary geologist Divya M. Persaud, and Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism.
The Hammer will present programs including an event with sculptor and fourth-generation beekeeper Garnett Puett during “Bee Week” (October 13–20), while Occidental College opens its rarely accessible Moore Lab of Zoology for public tours (October 6), revealing 65,000 rare birds and mammal species.
Self-Help Graphics & Art will co-host monthly Urban Garden Workshops at the Willowbrook Community Garden. Also engaging with neighborhood food production is Inglewood-based non-profit Crenshaw Dairy Mart who will be organizing workshops and community events around its abolitionist pods: autonomously irrigated, solar-powered gardens in geodesic domes serving communities across L.A. County.
In What Water Wants, Clockshop and artist Rosten Woo invite Angelenos to walk the L.A. River and reimagine their relationship to water with a 30-minute audio experience that moves between a guided meditation and a speculative disaster movie.
In Los Angeles, it turns out that art and science come together everywhere you look, especially during PST ART.