J. Paul Getty Museum

Overview

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, United States, is an encyclopedic art museum spanning two landmark sites: the hilltop Getty Center in Brentwood and the Getty Villa overlooking the Pacific in Pacific Palisades. Together they form one of California’s best-known cultural destinations, combining galleries, landscaped gardens, and sweeping city and ocean views.

At the Getty Center, visitors encounter European art from the Middle Ages to around 1900—including paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, drawings, and illuminated manuscripts—alongside 19th- to 21st-century photography from Europe, Asia, and the Americas. These collections are set within Richard Meier’s terraced complex and Central Garden, with dramatic views over Los Angeles. The Getty Villa, modelled on an ancient Roman country house, is dedicated to the arts and cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria, with around 44,000 antiquities in its holdings and over 1,300 objects on display in gallery spaces opening onto colonnades, fountains, and Mediterranean planting.

Art and Exhibitions

The J. Paul Getty Museum frequently stages contemporary art and photography exhibitions that place current practices in dialogue with its historic collections, architecture, and Los Angeles setting. Recent and upcoming shows at the Getty Center have highlighted artists working with experimental media, from holography and light-based installations in Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography to large-scale photographic surveys that probe identity, migration, Black art practice, and queer histories.

​Nineteenth-Century Photography Now, for example, invited contemporary artists to respond directly to early photography, using new image-making strategies to rethink inherited narratives of landscape, labour, and representation. By placing historical photographs alongside new work, the exhibition underscored how 19th-century technologies continue to shape the way artists engage with place, memory, and the politics of visibility today.

More recently, Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985, which opened at the Getty in early 2026, traces how African American and Afro-Atlantic diaspora artists used photography as a tool for social change from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s. Organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the exhibition presents around 150 photographs spanning studio portraiture, street photography, fashion imagery, graphic design, and community-based image making, highlighting artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, Gordon Parks, Ming Smith, and Emory Douglas. Across these programmes, the museum uses its galleries as a testing ground where new work can reframe canonical art-historical material for 21st-century audiences.

Visiting Information

Admission to both the Getty Center and Getty Villa is always free, but timed-entry reservations are required and must be booked in advance online. The Getty Center in Brentwood is typically open Tuesday to Sunday, with extended evening hours on Saturdays, and is closed on Mondays. The Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades generally opens from morning to late afternoon and is closed on Tuesdays, with seasonal adjustments and holiday closures. Visitors will find restaurants, cafés, gardens, and outdoor terraces across both locations, making the museum a full-day experience within the broader Los Angeles art museum scene.

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