Recording Artists

Check out Getty’s first podcast for kids and their families, If Objects Could Talk!

Listen as artifacts leave the museum vault and come alive to share their side of the story. Featuring objects from G…

Laser physicist Billy Klüver really loved his lasers. But what divided the beauty of the laser (at least in Klüver’s eyes) from art? As the co-founder of the nonprofit group Experiments in Art and Te…

What makes good art good and what makes that experience stick with you? Engineer Billy Klüver, who co-founded the nonprofit group Experiments in Art and Technology, has a great answer to that questio…

Did you know Robert Rauschenberg was fired by John Cage? Us either—until we heard Rauschenberg telling his side of the story to Barbara Rose in one of the interviews in Getty’s archives. We’re sharin…

Check out Getty’s newest podcast, ReCurrent, a series about what we gain by keeping the past present. In this inaugural episode, host and producer Jaime Roque shares a heartfelt journey through his f…

Laser physicist Billy Klüver had always been interested in art. So when he started working at Bell Labs in New Jersey in the late 1950s, he began going into Manhattan and meeting artists—and in short…

Artist Fujiko Nakaya is best known for her ethereal sculptures made with fog. But her very first fog sculpture, which kicked off decades of working with this unusual and highly technical material, ca…

Robert Rauschenberg is one of the best-known artists of the 20th century, in part because he never stopped exploring new mediums and styles. His work with new technology, however, is often overlooked…

In this special live episode of Recording Artists, season two host Tess Taylor speaks with Getty Research Institute curator Pietro Rigolo about the making of the series, what she discovered through t…

In 1975, Meret Oppenheim’s small painting Würgeengel, or Angel of Death, is included in a sprawling exhibition organized by famous curator Harald Szeemann. She had painted it over 40 years earlier, w…

In the mid-1960s, Nam June Paik is living in a run-down studio in SoHo, struggling to make ends meet. But even as he jokes about his ongoing battle against cockroaches, he is building his network, se…

On May 20, 1962, the morning after his first child is born, Benjamin Patterson writes a touching birth announcement to his own parents. The letter covers all the usual details—the baby’s weight and h…

By 1956, M. C. Richards has earned a PhD in English, taught poetry at Black Mountain College, gotten married (and divorced) twice, dedicated herself to pottery, helped found an artists’ cooperative a…

It’s July 1942, and the artist Marcel Duchamp has recently arrived in New York City after fleeing the Nazis in Vichy France. As he settles in, he writes to his longtime friend and fellow artist Man R…

In 1944, Frida Kahlo is at a crossroads, both in terms of her health and her career. In April of that year, with World War II dragging on, she writes to her gallerist—and former lover—Julien Levy. In…

This episode focuses on Betye Saar (b. 1926). Joining host Helen Molesworth are artist Linda Goode Bryant and art historian Marci Kwon. Saar is the only California artist in this series, and her work…

This episode focuses on Alice Neel (1900–1984). Joining host Helen Molesworth are artists Simone Leigh and Moyra Davey. Neel is known for striking, expressionistic portraits of family, friends, lover…