Los Angeles became "an art powerhouse" in just a few decades, Hopkins says, and the forces that created that situation needed to be documented. "We felt that the Getty was in a position to do something really interesting in terms of scholarship about the Southern California area."
"In the past," Weinstein says, "there was a tendency to undervalue the history of Los Angeles art. We didn't pay attention to our own history, which we now realize is a very strong alternative to the development of Modern art in New York. I think because of that cultural amnesia, people weren't taking care of their records.
"Lyn and Henry came to talk to us about precisely that subject. Their interest converged with our awareness that a lot of Los Angeles history was in danger of being lost. It seemed the moment when we could jump in and do something," she says.
"We had done an electronic cataloging initiative in Los Angeles, which was getting collections online in various museums. Through that, we became more aware of deep collections of Los Angeles art and the fact that a lot of archival material wasn't available. Then we started hearing stories about individuals who had died and survivors who were inclined to get rid of the records."
Armed with a Getty grant, Lyn Kienholz's organization surveyed public and private collections to determine what material existed and how much of it was cataloged and accessible to researchers. That led to other investigations, including an ongoing study of African American artists and arts organizations, and two grants to the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA to assess community organizations' archives and start an oral history program.
In the last few years, the Getty Foundation has given about $2.5 million in grants to catalog the archives of 10 institutions, including MOCA, CalArts and Scripps College, which has a major ceramics collection.
At LACMA, where various departmental archives will be merged, the project has turned up such things as an audiotape of a 1967 interview with artist Man Ray and a video of David Hockney driving a customized car through the museum grounds. And the grant has allowed the museum to put the catalog of its 1967-71 project, "Art and Technology," on its website.
Large institutions might be expected to have their archives in usable order for researchers, but that is rarely the case, Weinstein says. "There is such a backlog of archival material at public institutions. With our grants, we could prioritize this material."
