See the latest from Getty Museum’s digital offerings, including podcasts, digital exhibitions, news and stories.
Fighting fire at the Getty Villa Museum
Wildfires are a way of life in Southern California. But last January’s Palisades fire was a different beast. “That thing came down the hill fast,” says Les Borsay, Getty emergency preparedness specialist. “The winds were really bad. I think it was less than two hours, and it was already really, really close.” Things quickly got much worse.
Looking back at our most popular stories
It’s cold out there…the perfect time to curl up with a great story! In case you missed them, here are our eight most-clicked-on News & Stories pieces from 2025—tales of bravery during last January’s tragedy, unearthed LA history, and pioneers in the worlds of art, fashion, and architecture.
Fighting fire at the Getty Villa Museum
Wildfires are a way of life in Southern California. But last January’s Palisades fire was a different beast. “That thing came down the hill fast,” says Les Borsay, Getty emergency preparedness specialist. “The winds were really bad. I think it was less than two hours, and it was already really, really close.” Things quickly got much worse.
What to wear: the art museum edition
For many Getty visitors, a trip to peruse our galleries and gardens is also a chance to don some fabulous fashion. We stopped a few well-dressed folks strolling the Getty Center and asked them to share the inspiration behind their outfit and their approach to style.
A medieval feminist manuscript makes its Getty Museum debut
In her opening to The Book of the City of Ladies (French, about 1404–5), Christine de Pizan considers a small volume written by a contemporary male author: “But just the sight of this book, even though it was of no authority, made me wonder how it happened that so many different men…have been and are so inclined to express…so many wicked insults about women and their behavior.”
These words—and Christine de Pizan’s book-length response to the negative treatment of women by men—were memorialized in a luxurious French copy of her proto-feminist prose recently acquired by the Getty Museum.
Reopening the Getty Villa Museum after the Palisades Fire
The months following the Palisades fire provided an opportunity to improve Getty’s preparedness for future emergencies and share knowledge and resources with other institutions. “If you can’t learn from what just happened, then you’re doomed to repeat it, or the situation could be worse,” says Getty emergency preparedness specialist Les Borsay. “So we’re making sure that we look back at this and go, ‘Okay, what can we do better?’”
How exactly can we be better prepared?
This LA map has no freeways
Gaze upon cartographer Laura L. Whitlock’s map of a pre-highway LA—believed to be from 1927 and recently digitized by Getty—and you will discover faded elements of the city: a municipality near Venice home to a traveling zoo, “Yellow Car” streetcars, and yes, no freeways. Nearly a century later, the map prompts us to ponder the impact of radical transit changes.
An Albert Frey tour of Palm Springs
“The California desert continues to charm me,” Swiss-born architect Albert Frey wrote in a 1936 letter to his mentor, Le Corbusier. “[It] continues to nourish me, to give me an opportunity for modern architecture, from time to time. It is a most interesting experience to live in a wild, savage, natural setting, far from the big city.”
Should you visit Palm Springs soon—an opportune time is Modernism Week, held February 12 to 22—here is a guide to Frey’s surviving structures.
What makes a city hall historic?
Picture Carson, California, today, and one might think of its multicultural communities or the sports complex home to LA Galaxy and US Olympic soccer players. But in the not-so-distant past, the region was filled with landfills and refuse dumps. When Carson was officially incorporated into Los Angeles County in 1968, it needed a symbolic shift to commemorate that milestone and celebrate its growing population.
That symbol was Carson City Hall.
The fabulous fashion of Eunice W. Johnson
Eunice Walker Johnson’s passion for fashion was the driving force behind the Johnson Publishing Company (JPC), publisher of Ebony, Jet, and other popular magazines—and the largest Black-owned company in the United States until the turn of the millennium. Johnson, a trailblazing businesswoman, philanthropist, and cultural icon, cofounded JPC with her husband, John H. Johnson. She also served as Ebony’s iconically stylish fashion editor.
Seeing the light
Here in the heart of winter, we kick off a new series about color with white, since we so often associate it with snow or a blank page. We asked our experts to tell us how artists actually used white—to message purity, virtue, or something else entirely? The short answer: they have long chosen this color to achieve the effect of whites found in nature, though artists rendering Christian subjects, and an occasional architect, did use it to symbolize purity. We also delve into how poisonous the lead-laden pigment was...especially when painters ingested it by licking the tip of their brush.
For the record
Two hundred and thirty feet under ground, in a former limestone mine, more than 400 million federal employment records—personal data, career histories, and performance reviews—have been meticulously stored since the 1970s.
To help archivists tackle the challenges of preservation on a massive scale like this one, Getty experts are sharing what they know about caring for materials while gaining fresh perspectives on making collections more accessible.
Roses & Pixels: The Fight Over an Icon
In this episode of the podcast ReCurrent, host Jaime Roque looks back to the iconic Virgen de Guadalupe’s early roots on Tepeyac Hill—a mix of Indigenous and Spanish worlds that helps explain why she carries both faith and culture. Through these voices and places, Roque and his guests ask straight questions with real stakes: Who gets to redraw her? When is it devotion, and when is it pride or protest?