Welcome to Alta Sketchbook, your guide to Getty’s PST Art: Art & Science Collide festival. From landmark museums to pop-up galleries, more than 70 institutions across Southern California are participating in the third installment of PST Art (formerly Pacific Standard Time), the largest art event in the United States.
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Launched in 2011, PST Art will return every five years or so, with the next festival slated for 2030.
Artist Cai Guo-Qiang celebrated PST Art’s opening with a daytime fireworks show on September 15. The public can attend the mostly free-of-charge exhibitions as they open over the next few months; the festival’s formal closing event will take place in February 2025. While the shows range in subjects from ancient cosmologies to Indigenous futures and from environmental justice to biotechnology, all explore the past and potential connections between art and science.
Science may evoke SpaceX rocket launches or test tubes bubbling over at CalTech; however, Daniela Lieja Quintanar, the curator and co-curator of two respective PST Art exhibitions, insists that science is essential to life, not the property of corporations or academia. “Science is not only Western,” Quintanar explains. “There’s science in Indigenous cosmologies, in communities, and in history. A part of this show is learning that wherever you are from, there’s a tradition of science and technology that is part of everyday life.”
Shana Nys Dambrot, writer of the popular arts bulletin 13ThingsLA, launches this limited-run newsletter on September 21 by engaging with an exhibition featuring works of 10 artists interacting with the expertise and resources of Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists and engineers. Titled Blended Worlds: Experiments in Interplanetary Imagination, the exhibition at Glendale’s Brand Library and Art Center “explores alternate worlds and reimagines the one we already have, with the ultimate goal of figuring out how to merge them.”
In coming weeks, former Los Angeles Times art critic Carolina A. Miranda will examine environmental art from more than 20 artists drawing connections between social justice and human-caused disasters in Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice at the Hammer Museum.
In another upcoming installment, architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne will consider responses from artists to remote sensing technologies and how L.A.-based aerospace developments have led to infringements of civil liberties. The exhibition, titled Remote Sensing: Explorations into the Art of Detection, takes place at two sites operated by the Center for Land Use Interpretation.
Other Alta Sketchbooks will feature critics engaging with artists to discuss the ways they’re interacting with communities to develop creative methods to combat food insecurity, designing model cities of the future, and more. Along the way, our writers will recommend must-see shows and give you a heads-up on upcoming exhibitions.
PST Art is a gargantuan event, but we’ll help you navigate it, highlighting only its most intriguing takeaways. So, get ready to dive in.
There’s something for everybody to get excited about.•
Good to Know
- What: Getty’s PST Art: Art & Science Collide, featuring more than 800 artists and 70 institutions
- When: Sept. 15, 2024–Feb. 16, 2025
- Where: Southern California: from Santa Barbara to San Diego, from Palm Springs to Los Angeles
- Price: Most exhibitions are free, but admission varies
