History of Pacific Standard Time: A Monumental West Coast Art Initiative

PST ART (formerly known as Pacific Standard Time) is the most extensive initiatives in the United States. The umbrella title Pacific Standard Time evokes a geographical focus on the U.S. West Coast, particularly Southern California, stretching from Los Angeles to San Diego, Santa Barbara, and as far as Palm Springs.

Conceived by the Getty Foundation—the world’s richest arts organization—and Getty Research Institute in 2002, the inaugural Pacific Standard Time, themed Art in L.A. 1945–1980 debuted in 2011 with a budget of $10 million to “rescue an endangered history of L.A. art, foster recognition of the global significance of Los Angeles’ art scene, and create a new model for large-scale collaboration.” [1]

The second iteration Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (Los Angeles/Latin America) was launched in 2017 with $5 million in grants further expanding its scope, focusing on Los Angeles’s cultural, historical, and political ties with Latin America, reflecting Los Angeles’s colonial “origins—it was established in 1781 as part of New Spain—and current demographics of approximately fifty percent Latino.”[2]

Cai Guo-Qiang, WE ARE, 2024. Photo by Jori Finkel

Overview of Art & Science Collide

PST ART returned for its third edition this year with a bang.  The highly anticipated region-wide project, themed Art & Science Collide, kicked off with Cai Guo-Qiang’s pyrotechnic spectacle WE ARE: Explosion Event for PST ART at the Coliseum Stadium on September 15. Ironically, Cai’s AI-assisted, noise-and-air-pollution-producing fireworks took place amid three massive wildfires in Los Angeles, sending a “counterintuitive and bizarre” [3] message—according to journalist Jori Finkel—and setting a pretentious and wasteful tone for the rest of programs.

The following day, University of Southern California Pacific Art Museum spent its grant funds to stage a grand opening for the exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: A Material Odyssey, erecting an enormous tent for a lavish, self-congratulatory ceremony, where leadership figures from the university indulged themselves in prolonged back-patting and praised Cai to the skies. Meanwhile reports of multiple injuries caused by firework debris and growing environmental concerns over the deafening blasts, choking smokes and raining ashes from Cai’s extravaganza at the Coliseum the evening before emerged. After the public outcry, the Getty finally issued an apology. Any hopes for Cai to stage another pyrotechnic spectacle for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics seem to be nipped in the bud.

Backed by $20 million in Getty grants, the PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative spans 70 cultural institutions across Southern California, highlighting works of over 800 artists. The ambitious project features from Islamic scribes to contemporary artists and NASA scientists, including three Chinese artists Liu Xin, Zheng Bo and of course Cai Guoqiang, to “explore the intersections of Art and Science, both past and present, with diverse organizations activating exhibitions on topics like”. [4] The exhibition series is further elevated by a range of public programs, including live performances and even rocket launches.

Before exploring the exhibitions, let’s examine the meanings of the three key terms: “art,” “science,” and “collide.” “Art,” in essence, expresses thoughts, emotions, and experiences, reflecting how we perceive the world. It communicates ideas, using media not only as content but also as the vehicle for often open-ended expression. “Science,” on the other hand, is the systematic study of the natural and social world, grounded in evidence to expand knowledge and understanding. To “collide,” as defined by dictionaries, means to hit with force or to disagree strongly. With this in mind, I expected the intersections of art and science to be anything but cozy. I was hoping for dramas, in which art clashes with and challenges science.

Liu Xin in front of her work The Mothership, 2023. Photo by author.

After navigating nearly half of the 67 exhibitions in Los Angeles, it becomes apparent that mutual inspiration between art and science, environmental crises, and Indigenous knowledge dominate the discourse. Exemplary exhibitions are Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art at the Fowler Museum, What Water Wants at Clockshop, Sci-fi, Magick, Queer LA: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation at the University of South California Fisher Museum of Art, Open Sky at Pomona College’s Benton Museum of Art, and All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace at REDCAT, among  others.

Despite the significant funding and four years of preparation, some exhibitions fall short of expectations. Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism at the Brick is overwhelming in a different way: the art works placed in the gallery space compete against one another visually, auditorily, and spatially, resembling a messy hodgepodge. Several exhibitions either offer overly literal interpretations of the theme or are so contrived that they lose coherence, coming across as disjointed. Blended Worlds: Experiments In Interplanetary Imagination at the Brand Library & Art Center—in collaboration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory invites artists to visualize NASA’s scientific discoveries, experimentations and hypotheses, playing it safe with PST ART’s prescribed narrative. Meanwhile, the inclusion of Yoshitomo Nara’s famously branded angry little girls with big eyes in the group exhibition entitled Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice at the Hammer Museum seems oddly out of place, leaving viewers scratching their heads. Similarly, bringing Chinese literati paintings of gardens and plants from the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1911) into the discourse of science at the Huntington’s exhibition Growing and Knowing in the Gardens of China seems to be a stretch.

Some curators take a more critical approach. Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis at the Huntington interrogates the moral fault lines in scientific progress during the Industrial Revolution, historicizing its role in climate change, colonialism, ecological inequality, and environmental injustice. Other curators, however, take a more conservative and simplistic approach. Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography at the Getty Center gathers a few well known artists, such as John Baldessari, Louise Bourgeois and Ed Ruscha, to demonstrate how they employ holography to enrich their artistic practices, without any critical punch.

Indigeneity Now

As of this report, a few anticipated exhibitions remain on the horizon, slated to open later this year. By far, outstanding exhibitions are few and far between. However, I have found diamonds in the rough, particularly in the shows giving the spotlight to Indigenous peoples and their knowledge.

Will Wilson (Diné/Navajo), Hubris on the Land, Roden Crater, Shiprock Disposal Cell, from the series Connecting the Dots for a Just Transition, 2022. Archival pigment print. Courtesy of the artist.

In Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West at the Autry Museum of the American West, photography provocatively “collides” with science, revealing the dark side of imaging science that manifested the entwined destinies of reckless territorial expansion and detrimental resource extraction. The curator not only turns photography onto itself, but also challenges the hosting institution that  was conceived in the 1980s to romanticize and reinforce the myth of conquering the American West. Setting against the backdrop of the Western landscape, this layered presentation interrogates the survey science and the expansion of visual imaging technologies. Through the lens of photographers, such as Will Wilson, Lewis deSoto, Julie Shafer, Bremner Benedict, John Divola, and Byron Wolfe, the exhibition scrutinizes photography and its technologies employed by the state and settlers. It unpacks a devastating narrative of mass destruction, the erasure of Native American presence, exploitation of natural resources, mutation of land, and the covert national security apparatus on the West Coast, all resulting in irreversible human and environmental consequences.

Drone technology, once almost exclusively military, has now become accessible to ordinary consumers, which affords artists and activists to employ it for counter-surveillance. Navajo/Diné photographer Will Wilson used drone in Hubris on the Land, Roden Crater, Shiprock Disposal Cell  (2022) to uncover more than 500 uranium mines—represented by the dots on the photograph—on the Navajo Nation, where the information of contamination from decades of extraction was largely concealed from Native peoples.

Will Wilson (Diné/Navajo), Auto Immune Response/Survey 1, 2020. Archival pigment print. Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ralph M. Parsons Fund.

Edward S. Curtis, The Vanishing Race-Navaho, 1907-1930.

In another photograph Auto Immune Response/Survey (2020), he presents himself twice: once as a man in a gas mask confronting the viewer in a frontal view, and again, also in a gas mask, but in a three-quarter view, preparing a drone to survey a toxic, post-apocalyptic landscape of the Navajo reservation. The panoramic scene is assembled from collodion wet-plate photographs, a 19th-century technology once employed to document Native peoples as “the vanishing race.” By adopting this medium, he penetrates the fraught history of photography and survey science in the US. Paula Richardson Fleming and Judith Luskey noted, “European and American interest in the West had never been greater. It was an age desperately trying to be ‘scientific’ about all things. Specific knowledge about the vanishing frontier had to be obtained and communicated. It was time for experienced scientists to step into the scene.” [5] This pursuit of knowledge, which facilitated the displacement of Indigenous peoples and the conquest of land and resources, fueled numerous anthropological and geological surveys from the late 19th century into the early 2000s. Edward S. Curtis’s infamous The Vanishing Race—Navaho, photographed in 1904 using the exact wet-plate collodion process, epitomizes this narrative, which is further entrenched by Joseph Kossuth Dixon’s publication The Vanishing Race, comprising over 40,000 images of Native Americans, as the archive of “Noble Savages” destined for extinction. Wilson’s work confronts the viewer with the traumatic history embedded in the Western landscape and its ominous future.

Mural Fragment of Scalloped Shell with Hands and Animal Head (detail), 350–450 CE, Teotihuacan, Museo de Murales Teotihuacanos, Beatríz de la Fuente, photo © Museum Associates_LACMA, by Javier Hinojosa.

Masked Male Figure with Dance Staff, Mexico, Campeche, Jaina Island, Maya, 700–900 CE, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of John Gilbert Bourne, photo © Museum Associates_LACMA.

If Out of Site exposes the dark side of scientific progress in the name of modernism, We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art brings the loss of Indigenous knowledge and connection to nature into focus, shedding light on the usage of minerals, organic colorants, and vegetal binders to create complex painting and dyeing materials, and challenging colonial narratives, which have led to the hegemony of Western scientific paradigms and artistic canons, which minimized the significance of color in non-Western cultures and relegated Indigenous art to mere artifacts.

Color is a science of both light and matter that has illuminated the world of Indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica. With each of the five cardinal directions associated with a specific hue—black, red, blue/green, yellow, and white—these colors represent fundamental forces within the cosmos, tied to the movement of the sun and the changing light of day and night. In reclaiming their legacy, We Live in Painting presents over 270 Mesoamerican ceramic vessels, mural fragments, stone sculptures, and textiles, both ancient and contemporary. These works illustrate that Indigenous knowledge of colors stemmed from a profound understanding of nature, in which the entire universe—including time—was considered a living entity.

A magnificent example is the murals of Teotihuacan from its golden age (c. 300–400 CE): the aesthetic approach that played with subtle shifts in red hues created a “night vision” effect. “Figures, rendered in shades of pink and crimson, emerge from dark red backgrounds crafted from hematite. To create surfaces that glittered in the light, artists incorporated specular hematite into the paints and polished painted images with mica. The resulting scenes reflect the tonalli, or vital energy, of the moon, its shimmering rays casting enough light to distinguish shades but not colors.” [6] Equally fascinating is the palygorskite clay, the inorganic base of Maya blue, which was mixed with other clays to give ceramics both lightness and density.

The exhibition also includes works by contemporary Indigenous artists who continue to honor and revive traditional methods, exploring Indigenous color technology, because to them, the term “artist” conveys the idea of both art maker and knowledge keeper. Zapotec-American artist Porfirio Gutierrez is one of them.

Gutierrez is also featured in Sangre de Nopal/Blood of the Nopal: Tanya Aguiñiga & Porfirio Gutiérrez en Conversación/in Conversation, hosted by both the Fowler Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. The fiber art, performance and video included in the exhibition are in dialogue with selected LIS DXAN—temporary devotional structures layered with rugs during Holy Week celebrations in Teotitlán del Valle—and textile made by immigrant farmworkers living in California. The exhibition introduces the viewer to the narrative of one single pigment for dyeing natural fibers: the cochineal from the tiny silver insect, whose body, after harvested from nopal (prickly pear cactus), dried and ground into powder, miraculously transforms into brilliant, velvety red pigment. The technique was developed by the Zapotec peoples around 500 BC. The ingenuity, chemical stability, and chromatic intensity of cochineal changed the course of art and culture around the world, reaching as far as China through Manila by the Spanish Manila-Acapulco galleons beginning in 1564.

Installation view, Sangre de Nopal/Blood of the Nopal: Tanya Aguiñiga & Porfirio Gutiérrez en Conversación/in Conversation, 2024, Fowler Museum at UCLA. Photo by Elon Schoenholz.

Today cochineal is still used to color cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, food, beverages, and luxury textiles. Despite the global impact of cochineal, its spiritual and scientific origins within Indigenous Mexican communities remain underappreciated. Aguiñiga and Gutiérrez approach cochineal as a means of engaging with ancestral knowledge, collective memory, and personal experiences with migration and displacement. Their showcasing of cochineal provides a case study in Indigenous innovation, uplifting not only historical contributions, but also the legacy inherited by the Indigenous Oaxacan diaspora in California.

These two exhibitions led me to visit Gutiérrez’s studio in Ventura, a coastal city with a predominantly Latino population. Sitting between a cochineal grinder and a wooden loom, the artist explains, “To create pigments from cochineal is to manipulate chemistry. In these contexts, the connections between food, medicine, and art are deeply intertwined. The way we harvest cochineal and how we use it not only challenge our perception of color and matter, but also expand the vocabulary of science and chemistry.” For Gutiérrez, color is a database, a living archive of knowledge and labor passed down to him from his ancestors: how to follow the seasonal rhythms of nature to harvest plants, insects and minerals, and how to foster the harmonious relationships with the environment. In his studio, he uses the traditional recipes to produce pigments for natural dyes using traditional techniques. Pointing to the baskets of dried leaves and flowers on the floor, he patiently describes to me, “This particular Yee bigu gish—my native Zapotec for Pericon in Spanish—was harvested in my hometown in Oaxaca. These pomegranate husks will yield black shades. Here’s indigo (Indigofera suffruticosa), extracted from green leaves to produce blue, while Yagshi gives olive green, and fluorescent Yee bigu gishi creates orange. Garcin produces tan shades, and moss yields orange hues. A single plant can produce varying colors depending on the water and vessel used.”

Grinding Cochineal Insects on a traditional grinder. Photo by Nikhol Esteras.

Porfirio Gutiérrez with cochineal in his hands, Bell Arts Factory, Ventura, CA (2021). Photo by Liz Fish.

His materials for making textiles are dictated by nature’s cycles. His schedule within the studio aligns with the rainy season in California or Oaxaca for plant harvesting. Each plant carries the memory of its origins—the conditions under which it grew—an imprint of nature that can never be replicated. Gutiérrez’s mastery of his palette comes from a deep understanding of each dye’s properties and the countless potential chemical interactions.

Like an alchemist, he put a tiny pinch of cochineal in his palm to demonstrate to me how he both guided and yielded to nature’s will to adjust the color and its values through reactions with lemon juice, water, heat, or even the PH on his own hand. Then he directed my attention to a tapestry on his wall that radiated with 12 different shades of red and yellow—all produced by cochineal.

When asked about his thoughts on the land acknowledgements now performed by institutions across the US and Canada, Gutiérrez offers his honest reflection: “They could do far better by returning the land to us, the Indigenous peoples, so we can restore it with the reverence it deserves, and nurture it as our ancestors once did long before Columbus set foot on these shores.”

Human’s relationship with Earth and Indigenous knowledge are also foregrounded in Carolina Caycedo’s polemical exhibition We Place Life at the Center/Situamos la vida en el centro at Vincent Price Art Museum. In this exhibition Caycedo invites collaboration from various artists and movements, including Selk’nam poet Hema’ny Molina Vargas, Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame, photographer Paul Robert Wolf Wilson from the Klamath and Modoc Tribes, and  Coyotl + Macehualli, which supports local native habitats in Los Angeles, among many others. In a collective spirit, they present a diverse array of drawings, videos, installations, photographs, prints, sculptures and other objects, forming a critical yet uplifting counter-narratives to individualism that is emphasized in contemporary art practice, West-centric art history and Green capitalism, while highlighting the importance of Indigenous knowledge and ancestral practices for environmental stewardship, and advocating decolonizing conservation strategies through the lens of ecofeminism.

Ecofeminism emerged after 1972, when astronauts first photographed Earth from space, revealing thick furrows of smog marring the planet’s otherwise pristine blue and green surface. Since then, ecofeminism has developed as a political movement and theory at the intersection of feminism and ecology, calling for gender equality and a revaluation of non-patriarchal systems, urging for a deeper recognition of humanity’s dependence on the earth and the intrinsic value of all life.

Installation view, We Place Life at the Center, at the Vincent Price Art Museum: Carolina Caycedo, “Wanaawna Meets Salty Waters,” 2019, photo collage printed on cotton silk, and Carolina Caycedo “San Gabriel,” 2019, collage printed on cotton canvas. Photo by Paul Salveson.

Within this context, We Place Life at the Center encapsulates four years of Caycedo’s research and spiritual fieldwork, highlighting how Indigenous communities resist the false promises of Green capitalism, which, instead of solving environmental crises, perpetuates unequal and colonial power dynamics between the Global North and South. These communities spearhead processes of ecological regeneration and energy transitions that truly restore and heal their lands and waters.

Installation of We Place Life at the Center on the 2nd floor at the Vincent Price Art Museum. Photo by Paul Salveson.

Stretching like a flowing river between the first and second floors of the lobby is Caycedo’s large-scale, undulating Wanaawna Meets Salty Waters (2019), in which photographs of water from the Wanaawna and the San Gabriel Rivers—sources of most of Los Angeles’s freshwater—are collaged and printed on cotton silk, creating a dynamic and malleable structure inviting viewers from above and below to imagine themselves within this magic landscape. Rather than framing nature as a distant, picturesque scene through a window, as is typical of Western landscape painting, Caycedo treats the landscape as a portrait, bringing nature directly into the viewer’s experience. Standing in dialogue with Wanaawna Meets Salty Waters is the monumental Elwha’s Healing (2022) in the hallway on the second floor, composed of stunning aerial, satellite, and topographic photographic images, it documents the healing process of the Elwha River following the removal of its two dams in 2011 and 2014, attesting to nature’s capacity for regeneration and ecological rebirth.

Carolina Caycedo, “Elwha’s Healing,” 2022, satellite photo collage mural. Photo by Paul Salveson. © Vincent Price Art Museum.

The exhibition also showcases several of Caycedo’s ‘Mineral Intensive’ drawings, which depict global mining industries—such as those involving cobalt, iron, and other materials— juxtaposed with depictions of the harsh labor and environmental repercussions endured by the Global South to meet the rising demand for these minerals to fuel the Global North’s clean energy needs. The composite, unifying and epic nature of the works evokes the style of 1920s Mexican muralism, which blends various heroic narratives into a cohesive, high-drama composition. Inspired by historical Middle Eastern amulets, Caycedo has created a set of amulets for a fair energy transition, crafted from the same minerals as a means to realign humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

Carolina Caycedo, “Somi Se’k / The Land of the Sun-La Tierra del Sol,” 2020 Color pencil on paper 94 in x 70 inches (239 x 178 cm). Photo by Paul Salveson. Vincent Price Art Museum.

Another notable large-scale drawing is Somi Se’k (The Land of the Sun—La Tierra del Sol) (2020), rendered in the style of 15th- and 16th-century portolan charts that featured nautical maps with picturesque details of landmarks for European colonizers to expand their maritime reach to the New World.  Somi Se’k is the name used by the Estok Gna and Carrizo Comecrudo Tribes for the lands on both sides of the Rio Grande. In Caycedo’s work, the Amistad Dam on the Rio Grande, the Permian Basin, and the McDonald Observatory are depicted alongside regional flora and fauna, creating a “counter-geography” that connects the region’s present, past, and future, urging viewers to consider the area as both a cultural site and a landscape burdened by man-made catastrophes.

Amidst the exhibition’s weighty themes, a sense of playfulness and hope emerges through light-hearted works. The emotionally charged embroidery and appliqué pieces on burlap, crafted by the Colombian collective El Movimiento Social en Defensa de los Ríos Sogamoso y Chucurí, humorously depict endangered native animals, blending whimsy with urgency. Caycedo’s own The Bionave Flotilla (2024)—a rocket ship sculpture crafted from a vinyl biodigester tube—draws inspiration from the technologies and aesthetics of environmental movements like RedBioCol (The Colombian Biomass Energy Network). These vernacular visual styles defy traditional hierarchies, pushing the viewer to rethink the boundaries between art and craft, and to question the conditions under which art is created.

The exhibition’s complexity is a testament to how Indigenous perspectives can profoundly reshape our understanding of the natural world and confront dominant narratives of progress and consumption. By centering Indigenous knowledge and ecofeminist principles, Caycedo not only exposes the violent legacies of colonization but also suggests pathways toward healing and ecological restoration. These works speak to the possibility of a future rooted in reciprocity and care for the Earth, rather than extraction and exploitation.

Conclusion

While a few more exhibitions, like Reframing Dioramas: The Art of Preserving Wilderness at the Natural History Museum, offer standout moments, the overall interpretations of “Art & Science Collide” fall short. The theme’s potential is reduced to cliched narratives: the polite dialogue between art and science, or the familiar call for environmental justice. The urgency implied by “collide” is mostly neglected, leaving deeper tensions unexplored, such as disagreements between archaeological science and art history methodologies. Media deeply rooted in scientific processes, like bronze alloy or glassblowing, are conspicuously absent as well. Even more perplexing is the irony that, while these exhibitions lecture on climate change and ecological responsibility, they contribute to the very crises they critique—racking up significant carbon footprints through global shipping, production, and waste. It’s estimated that the art world emits over 70 million tonnes of CO2 annually, surpassing the emissions of an entire nation like Austria.[7][8]

Installation view of Mercedes Dorame’s works in the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments at the Armory in Pasadena. The images were taken by Yubo Dong @ofphotostudio.

Mercedes Dorame, (detail) They Dance Across the Water – Mwaar’a Hevuuchok Yakeenax (Plinth Arrangement w/ Concrete Objects, Resin Objects, Cinammon). The images were taken by Yubo Dong @ofphotostudio.

That said, there is hope. One of the most promising aspects of this year’s PST ART is the strong and unprecedented presence of Indigenous knowledge and communities. Artists like Mercedes Dorame, Porfirio Gutiérrez, and Will Wilson, among others, lead this charge, transforming the discourse. They remind us that the convergence of art and science can be more than intellectual posturing—it can be a nuanced and poetic site of reclamation, healing, and re-envisioning a future where Indigenous wisdom is at the forefront of both cultural and environmental resilience.

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Footnotes:

1. Getty Foundation. Pacific Standard Time Report. https://www.getty.edu/foundation/pdfs/_reports/pst_report_web.pdf. Accessed October 4, 2024.
3. The Art Newspaper. “Cai Guo-Qiang Fireworks Getty PST Art Launch Event.” https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/09/16/cai-guo-qiang-fireworks-getty-pst-art-launch-event. Accessed on October 4, 2024.
4. Getty Foundation. https://www.getty.edu/projects/pacific-standard-time-2024/. Accessed on October 4, 2024.
5. Paula Richardson Fleming and Judith Luskey. The North American Indians in Early Photographs. Dorset Press, 1988, p. 105.
6. Diana Magaloni, Davide Domenici, and Alyce de Carteret. We Live In Painting. Los Angeles County Museum of Art & Delmonico D.A.P., 2024, p. 23.
7. The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in collaboration with Julie’s Bicycle. The Art of Zero. https://juliesbicycle.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ARTOFZEROv2.pdf. Accessed on October 4, 2024.
8. Our World In Data. https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/austria. Accessed on October 4, 2024.