Getty Art + Ideas

It’s where John Cage staged his first Happening, Fridays were often dedicated to art classes, and all faculty, staff, and students participated in the college’s operations from farming to construction. Located in the mountains near Asheville, NC, Black Mountain College was an experimental school founded upon the idea of “learning by doing.” We stop by the Hammer Museum’s exhibition, "Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957," to talk to Helen Molesworth, curator of the exhibition and chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

“He was always about the particular. The completely particular. This particular shape, this particular form, this particular color...everything is completely unique and particular.” So says Yve-Alain Bois, art historian and professor of art history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, about the celebrated, late artist Ellsworth Kelly. In this conversation, Bois shares what he learned about Kelly’s life, artistic process, and interest in the particular while working on the artist’s catalogue raisonné.

Weekend bike trips to visit Medieval churches of southern England with his father; an excavation digging in Roman Canterbury at age fourteen. And so Colin Renfrew’s lifelong fascination with the past began. Renfrew talks about his life and career of piecing together ancient fragments, how the field of archaeology has evolved, and what role governments play in this dynamic and political discipline. Renfrew is a retired professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of the British Academy.

In a four-part series, we’ll explore architect Frank Gehry’s Los Angeles and how his practice has evolved during his seventy years as an Angeleno. In 1947, Frank Gehry boarded a train in Toronto bound for Los Angeles, his uncle picked him up from Union Station, and the rest, as they say, is history. In the first installment of the series, Gehry shares stories from his first years in the City of Angels and how his interest in architecture began.

Here’s a sneak peek of Art + Ideas, a podcast in which Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, talks with artists, writers, curators, and scholars about their work. The podcast launches on June 29, 2016. Stay tuned!