LA's Griffith Park Is a Venue for Getty Art Festival

By Jim Farber

On Dec. 16, 1896, a successful mining investor and land speculator named Griffith J. Griffith donated 3,015 acres of land to the City of Los Angeles. Named in his honor, Griffith Park is an LA landmark, home to Griffith Observatory and the Autry Museum of the American West, both of which are hosting exhibits as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide -- a voluminous arts festival sponsored by the Getty.

If you're in LA and want to take part in the great treasure hunt of PST ART, a visit to the Autry and the observatory should definitely be on your list of venues to take in. In fact, you can easily spend an entire day exploring the multiple points of interest Griffith Park has to offer -- from its vintage carousel, the adventure land of the Los Angeles Zoo, the antique steam trains of Travel Town or wandering the miles of hiking trails.

While the Autry Museum was founded by Gene Autry, it was never intended as a vanity showplace. It is a world-class institution devoted to exploring the diverse cultures, complex history and multiple artistic legacies of the West -- from the prehistoric to the ultra-contemporary.

As part of PST ART, the Autry is hosting two decidedly contrasting exhibits: "Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West" and the more whimsical "Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology."

"Out of Site" is an expansive historical survey that combines historic artifacts, paintings and photography with work by contemporary artists. It traces the use of land in the West, from the rampaging, land-ripping days of the gold rush (when the idea was to get rich quick, pillage the landscape and head home) to explorations of today's landscapes as seen from satellites and drones, including a ghostly series of arial photographs of former atomic bomb test sites in the Nevada desert by Emmet Gowin.

"Future Imaginaries" focuses on the collision of art and science through the lens of pop-culture science-fiction cinema. It includes more than 50 artworks on display and interspersed throughout the museum that are designed to create unexpected encounters and dialogues between contemporary Indigenous creations and historic examples from the Autry's collections.

Artists such as Andy Everson, Ryan Singer and Neal Ambrose Smith create work that upends pop-culture icons (Yoda transformed into a piece of Pre-Columbian pottery) by indigenizing iconic sci-fi characters and storylines, such as Cara Romero's cyberpunk "Three Sisters" a trio of ultra-cool and plugged teens whose skin is modeled with ancient tribal patterns.

Signage in the exhibit explains that the artists "use pop culture science fiction to counter historical myths and the ongoing impact of colonization, including environmental degradation and toxic stereotypes."

Griffith Park is vast. And it will take about half an hour to navigate from the Autry to the promontory on the south-facing slope of Mount Hollywood that is home to the Griffith Observatory.

Although sketches for a proposed observatory date back to the founding of the park, it was not until 1933 that construction actually began under the banner of the Works Projects Administration. The doors opened on May 14, 1935, to reveal a masterful blending or scientific function and displays housed in a masterpiece of streamline art deco design.

Compared to the intergalactic nature of its planetarium programs, public view telescopes and fascinating exhibits, the observatory's contribution to PST ART is an enjoyable 23-minute animated film called "Pacific Standard Universe." Designed primarily for school groups, it "explores how cosmological symbols from ancient times (the Aztec Calendar Stone or the Chumash pictographs in Southern California) and the imagery produced by the observatories and aerospace industry of California have transformed our perception of the universe."

Spending a day at Griffith Park is one great way to take in this LA landmark and experience two of the Getty's PST ART exhibitions.

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WHEN YOU GO

Griffith Observatory: www.griffithobservatory.org

Autry Museum of the American West: www.theautry.org

Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide: www.getty.edu/projects/pacific-standard-time-2024

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Jim Farber is a freelance writer. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.