The glimmering Getty Museum can appear to be a faraway place, full of prestigious art that may perhaps seem hard to understand for an average person. But the J. Paul Getty Trust has made it a goal to change that.
Through multiple programs, the Getty Trust has the common goal of making art and arts education more comprehensible, particularly to students within the Los Angeles area. The programs include a single-visit program, essentially a field trip, for K-12 students, a photography initiative for teenagers, and administrative programs for teachers and school faculty. The Trust uses education to promote the idea that the Getty is available for all who wish to access it, said Erin Branham, the manager of school communities at the Getty Museum.
“We are deeply committed to making sure that students get a chance to find out that the Getty is a welcoming place that is for them,” Branham said, “That art is accessible, that they have the tools necessary to understand and create meaning out of art.”
Across its two locations, the Getty Museum sees about 165,000 children through programs every year. An important aspect of its single-visit program is the incorporation of bus funding for Title I schools, schools with student bases in which at least 40% come from low-income families, said Keishia Gu, head of education at the Getty Museum. Teachers can submit applications for funding, which the Getty then reviews. The Getty will pick up the cost of transportation for Title I schools within a 30-mile radius of the museum. The Trust spends about a million dollars a year on transportation for underfunded schools.
“The Getty does a tremendous amount of outreach, especially with the Title I bus funding where we’re saying please come, please come, we’ll pay for you to come,” Gu said.
Once students arrive at the Getty, they are greeted by docents who lead them on a one-hour tour of the museum. They stop in all four of the galleries and often analyze specific pieces of art in each of the galleries to fully understand the pieces, such as the mediums used and the historical background. The tours, however, are not strictly planned, but function on a student-led philosophy that promotes spontaneity and uniqueness, Branham said. For example, the docents will ask students which pieces in the galleries seem interesting to them, and then the group will focus specifically on those works.
“We generally start on some general tips on how to look at art,” Branham said. “Then we ask the students to tell us what they see, what they’re interested in and what they’re curious about, and the tour proceeds from there.”
In addition to single-day visits, the Getty also has programs geared toward student in science, technology, engineering, arts and math, Gu said. The Getty Conservation Institute, which works with both the scientific disciplines of art conservation and humanities-specific subjects such as history, is where many of the labs take place. In these labs, students focus on how the various subjects play a role in art, Gu said. For example, they learn about the scientific process that is involved in conserving ancient art.
The Getty also provides a summer program that trains older students to become tour guides as part of an internship, Gu said. This allows the Getty to expand its docent program while simultaneously giving students exposure to careers in the museum industry.
There is also a college program that provides behind-the-scenes tours during which students can see art that is not on display and visit parts of the museum that are usually closed to the public. This program is often run in conjunction with history and art history professors who are aware of the program and encourage their students to participate, Gu said.
“For us to do these educational programs, it’s our way of really opening the Getty doors and saying let’s give you that look, let’s give you that peek,” Gu said.
Teachers and school faculty are essential colleagues for the Getty in integrating an arts education into students’ learning. For the last four years, the Getty has partnered with the Inner City Education Foundation, a set of charter schools in South Los Angeles. Through this partnership, the Getty has embedded its own staff among the schools’ core subject as well as visual and performing arts staff to encourage art-heavy curriculums, Branham said.
The Getty staff helps the core curriculum staff by integrating the arts into pacing guides, which direct the teachers as to what they should be covering throughout the year, Branham said. The art-heavy curriculum is centered mostly around language arts classes with a specific emphasis on writing and engaging students in what they’re learning. An arts education can also improve students’ social-emotional learning and empathy, Branham said.
“We’ve seen a tremendous change in those schools in the past four years in their interest in and ability to integrate the arts into their curriculum,” Branham said.
Another program offered by the Getty is Unshuttered, a 10-week, intensive routine centered on digital photography, said David Bowles, the Getty’s education specialist for youth development.
During the most recent Unshuttered program, 10 competitively selected teenagers worked on various photo challenges in which they were able to build skills, both formal and informal, Bowles said. While they learned technical skills focused on how to take photos, the teens were also guided in areas such as how to interview subjects prior to photographing them.
Through outreach via social media, students were offered the opportunity to apply to be part of the program. The selection process for the program aimed to bring together a varied group of students from different backgrounds that would be chosen for both their skill and potential ideas, Bowles said.
“You want 10 really unique perspectives, unique backgrounds, unique styles of using the tool,” Bowles said. “So, we really tried to balance the group and make sure we had a wide variety of voices, a wide variety of perspectives to bring to the table.”
At the conclusion of this year’s program, there will be a temporary exhibition at which the teenagers’ photographs will be on display at the Getty. The participants will therefore be able to say they have work on display at the Getty, which Bowles said is one of the most exciting components of the program.
Branham said she hopes the public understands that the Getty and the art and culture found within it are accessible. Access to the arts becomes incumbent upon the museum to provide opportunities and exposure, particularly for those in underserved areas, Branham said.
“We believe strongly in the arts as a powerful piece of every student’s learning; it’s part of being a whole human being,” Branham said.