The Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies received one of six grants to UCLA from the Getty Foundation to research and plan exhibitions for the third iteration in 2024 of “Pacific Standard Time” The project, “Verdant Worlds: Exploration and Sustainability across the Cosmos,” explores the intersections between the visual arts and science and is a collaboration between UCLA’s Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies and Caltech’s Graduate Aerospace Laboratories. It explores the ways in which artists, scientists and imagineers informed each other, envisioning seemingly unimaginable futures, transforming fantasies into realities as they looked beyond known limits to dream of new verdant worlds. The resulting collaboration and research will be transdisciplinary in nature and includes major scholars, world-renowned artists and some of the most innovative scientists in the world. It will result in an exhibition at USC Fisher Museum of Art about exploration and sustainability in the Spanish and British empires, as articulated by scientists and artists; the entanglement of these European ideas with indigenous epistemologies; and their legacies in art and science today, including NASA’s scheduled trips to the Moon and Mars in 2024. The collaboration also includes an exhibition catalogue, with contributions by major scholars that will define the topic for years to come. Charlene Villaseñor Black, professor of art history and Chicana and Chicano and Central American studies at UCLA, and Morteza Gharib, professor of aeronautics and bioinspired engineering at CalTech, will participate in and oversee research, curation, programming, and publications.
More information about the scope of the Getty Foundation grants and all of the UCLA arts projects that are part of “Pacific Standard Time” for 2024 is at the UCLA Newsroom.
