Los Angeles, for all its glamour and global visibility, carries layers of stories too often hidden or marginalized. Over the past year, the J. Paul Getty Trust has quietly repositioned itself at the heart of a cultural reckoning: how to preserve and amplify Black artistic heritage in a city shaped by inequality, displacement, and contested memory.
A Shift Behind the Scenes
When you walk through the Getty’s pristine galleries or lush gardens, you might not immediately see the politics. But under the surface, a deliberate strategy is unfolding: grant programs, landmark designations, acquisitions, and archival expansion all targeted at Black cultural legacy.
One of the most striking moves: the Getty acquiring 4.5 million images from Johnson Publishing Co., the house behind Jet and Ebony, making its archive more accessible to scholars and the public. The institution also secured architectural plans and works from architect Paul R. Williams, the first Black member of the American Institute of Architects, whose modernist buildings shaped L.A.’s mid-century skyline.
Beyond acquisitions, the Getty’s “African American Historic Places” project has spent months identifying sites of Black cultural significance across L.A. from barbershops and salons to ballrooms, jazz clubs, and salons that once hosted community salons and meetings.
Why It Matters Here
Los Angeles is paradoxical: its reputation is global, but its cultural memory is local, fragile, fragmented. As neighborhoods change, landmarks vanish, and oral history recedes, preserving Black cultural anchors becomes not nostalgia, but necessity.
Under rising pressure to defund diversity efforts in federal arts institutions, the Getty’s role becomes more critical. While public institutions scale back, private ones with resources must bear more weight in safeguarding marginalized narratives.
The Getty’s work doesn’t erase L.A.’s past erasures but it offers a scaffold for re-anchoring stories that were once invisible. For Angelenos and visitors alike, this means walking through museums and city blocks with a renewed lens: one attuned to suffering, resistance, resilience and beauty born from struggle.
