Results by title

When Rutgers professor Amber N. Wiley began teaching her African American Art class in 2018, she and her students made a shocking discovery. While the university’s Zimmerli Art Museum had over seventy thousand artworks in its collection, only one of the pieces on display was by a Black American woman. The students, who came from a variety of majors and reflected the ethnic diversity of New Jersey itself, agreed something needed to be done to correct this imbalance. And so begins the story of the groundbreaking exhibition: Collective Yearning.

In this book, Wiley tells the story of how she and her student curators took a deep dive into the Zimmerli’s holdings to recover, catalog, and display its art by Black women. Along the way, contributors discuss the ethics of curation, the history of African American expressive traditions, and the institutional biases that erase or marginalize Black female perspectives. Richly illustrated with pieces from the exhibition, including little-seen work by such visionaries as Faith Ringgold, Renée Stout, and Kara Walker, Collective Yearning makes a powerful statement on the importance of showcasing Black women artists. 

The first comprehensive catalogue of the Getty Museum’s significant collection of French Rococo ébénisterie furniture.

This catalogue focuses on French ébénisterie furniture in the Rococo style dating from 1735 to 1760. These splendid objects directly reflect the tastes of the Museum’s founder, J. Paul Getty, who started collecting in this area in 1938 and continued until his death in 1976.
 
The Museum’s collection is particularly rich in examples created by the most talented cabinet masters then active in Paris, including Bernard van Risenburgh II (after 1696–ca. 1766), Jacques Dubois (1694–1763), and Jean-François Oeben (1721–1763). Working for members of the French royal family and aristocracy, these craftsmen excelled at producing veneered and marquetried pieces of furniture (tables, cabinets, and chests of drawers) fashionable for their lavish surfaces, refined gilt-bronze mounts, and elaborate design. These objects were renowned throughout Europe at a time when Paris was considered the capital of good taste.
 
The entry on each work comprises both a curatorial section, with description and commentary, and a conservation report, with construction diagrams. An introduction by Anne-Lise Desmas traces the collection’s acquisition history, and two technical essays by Arlen Heginbotham present methodologies and findings on the analysis of gilt-bronze mounts and lacquer.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/rococo/ and includes zoomable, high-resolution photography. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book, and JPG downloads of the main catalogue images.

The Getty Research Journal presents peer-reviewed articles on the visual arts of all cultures, regions, and time periods. Topics often relate to Getty collections, initiatives, and broad research interests. The journal welcomes a diversity of perspectives and methodological approaches, and seeks to include work that expands narratives on global culture.

This issue features essays on a technical examination of a peacock fresco fragment formerly thought to be an ancient Roman artifact; a necrology of French Jesuit artist Jean-Denis Attiret, court painter to the Qianlong emperor in China; the afterlives of bronze zodiac animal head sculptures from the looted Qing-era Yuanmingyuan; the commissioning of a sepulchral monument in Santiago, Chile, for the late archbishop at the end of the nineteenth century; the effect of non finito in the early twentieth-century work of Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler; a series of performances in laundromats across Los Angeles in 1977 by the feminist art collective Mother Art; and photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe's book from 1986 narrating the history of Black women photographers.

Shorter texts include notices on the placement and subsequent censorship of the two riflemen in David Alfaro Siqueiros’s Los Angeles mural América tropical of 1932, and material traces of performance in the archive of Simone Forti that offer glimpses of the interdisciplinary artist's activities between 1970 and 1972.

The issue also includes a conversation between the curators of the exhibition Lumen: The Art and Science of Light, held at the Getty Museum in 2024.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at getty.edu/publications/getty-research-journal/21/ and includes zoomable illustrations. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book.

An eminent historian assembles a career-long group of essays about art collecting and the leadership, strategies, and shifting cultural power of American art museums as they have emerged over the past 150 years.

Museums and their cultural power, and the vagaries of collecting in the United States have fascinated University of Chicago historian Neil Harris for more than sixty years. In this collection of eighteen lively essays from across his distinguished career, Harris addresses period rooms, visitor research, museum education, museum branding and merchandising, and the persistent influence of individual collectors and patrons such as J. Pierpont Morgan, among other important topics. Harris’s geographical range is broad, too, with considerations of museums in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Toledo, Chicago, Denver, and elsewhere.

Harris remains one of a very small number of art-minded scholars whose work on museums, taste, and collecting not only can be read by other historians of the United States but can be read with real profit. In a rich and reflective introduction, Harris connects his deep interest in recurring subjects to both his own intellectual biography and broader trends in American scholarship.

Copiously illustrated, Queer Lens explores the transformative role of photography in LGBTQ+ communities from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Winner of the 2026 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Anthology

“An outstanding addition to the growing body of scholarship around queer imagery.”
—Jim Van Buskirk, The Bay Area Reporter
 
“A tour de force. . . . A profound collective story of creativity, joy and resistance.”
—Emma Jacob, Aesthetica Magazine
 
“Potent and inspiring. . . . An empowering photography retrospective that reflects American queer communities.”
—Aleena Ortiz, Foreword Reviews
 
“A deeply significant and beautifully produced volume."
—All About Photo.com
 
“Eye-catching."
—Matthew Wexler, Queerty.com

Photography’s power to capture a subject—representing reality, or a close approximation—has inherently been linked with the construction and practice of identity. Since the camera’s invention in 1839, and despite periods of severe homophobia, the photographic art form has been used by and for individuals belonging to dynamic LGBTQ+ communities, helping shape and affirm queer culture and identity across its many intersections.

Queer Lens explores this transformative force of photography, which has played a pivotal role in increasing queer visibility. Lively essays by scholars and artists explore myriad manifestations of queer culture, both celebrating complex interpretations of people and relationships and resisting rigid definitions. Featuring a rich selection of images—including portraits of queer individuals, visual records of queer kinship, and documentary photographs of early queer groups and protests—this volume investigates the medium’s profound role in illuminating the vibrant tapestry of LGBTQ+ communities.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 17 to September 28, 2025.

To celebrate the acquisition of the archive of distinguished artist Tom Phillips, the Bodleian Library asked the artist to assemble and design a series of books drawing on his themed collection of over 50,000 photographic postcards. These encompass the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which, thanks to the ever cheaper medium of photography, ordinary people could afford to own portraits of themselves. Each book in the series contains two hundred images chosen from a visually rich vein of social history. Their covers also feature thematically linked paintings, specially created for each title, from Phillips’s signature work, A Humument.

Readers, as its title suggests, shows people reading (or pretending to read) a wide variety of material, from the Bible to Film Fun, either in the photographer’s studio, in their own home, or on vacation on the beach. Each of these unique and visually stunning books give a rich glimpse of forgotten times and will be greatly valued by art and history lovers alike.

How do students develop a personal style from their instruction in a visual arts program? Women Artists on the Leading Edge explores this question as it describes the emergence of an important group of young women artists from an innovative post-war visual arts program at Douglass College.

The women who studied with avant-garde artists at Douglas were among the first students in the nation to be introduced to performance art, conceptual art, Fluxus, and Pop Art. These young artists were among the first to experience new approaches to artmaking that rejected the predominant style of the 1950s: Abstract Expressionism. The New Art espoused by faculty including Robert Watts, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Geoffrey Hendricks, and others advocated that art should be based on everyday life. The phrase “anything can be art” was frequently repeated in the creation of Happenings, multi-media installations, and video art. Experimental approaches to methods of creation using a remarkable range of materials were investigated by these young women. Interdisciplinary aspects of the Douglass curriculum became the basis for performances, videos, photography, and constructions. Sculpture was created using new technologies and industrial materials. The Douglass women artists included in this book were among the first to implement the message and direction of their instructors.

Ultimately, the artistic careers of these young women have reflected the successful interaction of students with a cutting-edge faculty. From this BA and MFA program in the Visual Arts emerged women such as Alice Aycock. Rita Myers, Joan Snyder, Mimi Smith, and Jackie Winsor, who went on to become lifelong innovators. Camaraderie was important among the Douglass art students, and many continue to be instructors within a close circle of associates from their college years. Even before the inception of the women’s art movement of the 1970s, these women students were encouraged to pursue professional careers, and to remain independent in their approach to making art. The message of the New Art was to relate one’s art production to life itself and to personal experiences. From these directions emerged a “proto-feminist” art of great originality identified with women’s issues. The legacy of these artists can be found in radical changes in art instruction since the 1950s, the promotion of non-hierarchical approaches to media, and acceptance of conceptual art as a viable art form.