The Getty has over the last two decades spent around $50m on the exhibition extravaganza known as PST Art. But it has not had a department or team on staff dedicated to producing the event until now.
In time to plan the 2030 edition, the Getty today is naming Justine Ludwig, currently the executive director of Creative Time, as the creative director of PST Art. She will relocate from New York to start the newly created position on 27 October. In California, she will head up a team that includes Zachary Kaplan, head of programming, and Tina Lee, project manager, both of whom contributed to the last edition. She will also have the budget to make a few additional hires, including a marketing and communications specialist, signalling the Getty’s commitment to PST Art going forward.
“Justine was really the clear choice among many extraordinary candidates we considered,” says Joan Weinstein, the head of the Getty Foundation, who praised her “experience in doing collaborative projects, which is heart of what Creative Time does in New York”, as well as her managerial expertise with large-scale, multiple-stakeholder undertakings. “Also she’s had experience in a number of different cities. She will bring some wonderful new ideas to PST Art.”
“This role is a dream in so many ways for me,” says Ludwig. “It’s a way to think collectively about a creative ecosystem that I so deeply admire—southern California and the breadth and wealth of cultural institutions and creative voices throughout the region.” She adds that the PST Art premise of inviting (and funding) partner institutions to stage exhibitions on a single theme, each responding in their own way to the same prompt, “is so rare and inspirational”.
Ludwig’s group is expected to work closely with the smaller museums and non-profits that participate in PST Art, who already benefit from exhibition grants but have called for more support, or perhaps just expertise, in areas such as planning publications and travelling their shows. She is also tasked with refining or rethinking the programming. (Last year’s PST Art, on the theme of “Art & Science Collide”, started off with Cai Guo Qiang’s explosive firework display at the Coliseum, which was not just off-message given all the eco-themed exhibitions but actually injured some spectators.)
Ludwig has been the director of Creative Time, known for realising ambitious public art projects, since 2018. In that role she oversaw major commissions by Chloë Bass, Charles Gaines, Jill Magid, Rashid Johnson and Jenny Holzer, among others. She also started CTHQ, a community space billed as “a gathering space for art and politics”, and a fellowship programme for artists doing interdisciplinary, research-intensive work. From 2015 to 2018 she worked at Dallas Contemporary, originally as the senior curator and director of exhibitions and ultimately as the deputy director and chief curator. She started her curatorial career at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.
A partnership of the Getty Foundation and the Getty Research Institute (GRI), PST Art was previously run by Weinstein in conjunction with the GRI’s deputy director Andrew Perchuk. The two had conceived the idea together as a way to preserve and showcase Los Angeles’s artistic history, and the first edition in 2011 focused on the city’s art scene from 1945 to 1980. (The second edition, launched in 2017, focused on connections between artists in Los Angeles and Latin America.) But the prospect of continuing to direct the initiative together was untenable, Weinstein says, once the Getty committed to a quinquennial schedule.
“Andrew and I will continue to be involved but not in the same day-to-day capacity,” Weinstein says. Now, she adds, she can go back to her “day job”, which involves overseeing philanthropic gifts exceeding $12m annually.
The Getty plans to announce the overarching theme for the fourth edition of PST Art by the end of 2025. Expect the first round of grants to museums, earmarked for research and planning, to be announced by autumn of 2026.
