Check out season two of ReCurrent, a Getty podcast about what we gain by keeping the past present.

Hosted by Jaime Roque, this season explores cultural stories hidden in photographs, archives, and everyday places. Hear from artists, activists, and communities where Getty stories continue to unfold.

On this episode, Backlot and Barrio, Jaime spends time with photographer George Rodriguez, whose camera moved between Hollywood’s backlots and Los Angeles’ East Side. He documented celebrity culture while remaining deeply rooted in community, identity, and resistance.

Subscribe to ReCurrent wherever you get your podcasts and at getty.edu/podcasts/recurrent, where you can also find additional images and transcripts.

Check out Getty’s first podcast for kids and their families, If Objects Could Talk!

Listen as artifacts leave the museum vault and come alive to share their side of the story. Featuring objects from Getty's antiquities collection, each episode introduces listeners to the history, creation, and everyday use of incredible items like an Egyptian cat statue, an ancient kind of dice, and a glass flask shaped like a fish. Voice actors and immersive sound design bring these historical fiction tales to life.

Listen and learn more at https://www.getty.edu/podcasts/if-objects-could-talk/. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear the inaugural season, beginning September 8, 2025.

Discover Getty’s latest podcast, ReCurrent, a series about what we gain by keeping the past present.

In the debut episode, host and producer Jaime Roque embarks on a personal journey into his family’s heritage and explores the role of food in preserving cultural heritage.

Check out the full series and learn more at getty.edu/recurrent. Be sure to follow and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Check out the newest season of Recording Artists, hosted by actor, artist, and futurist Ahmed Best. Explore the Getty archives and learn about the innovative art-science group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in season three, out now.

This first episode of the season features Robert Rauschenberg, weaving archival recordings of the artist with new interviews by MoMA chief curator at large and publisher Michelle Kuo and cognitive-studies scientist Xiaodong Lin-Siegler.

Learn more about the episode and subscribe to the series.

The Getty Patron Program is a proud sponsor of this podcast.

Additional music from “Variations VII” written by John Cage courtesy of Henmar Press, Inc.

Enjoy this episode from season 2 of Getty's other podcast, Recording Artists. This series features materials from Getty's archives. This season, titled Intimate Addresses, highlights artists' letters.

To hear the rest of the season, subscribe to Recording Artists on your favorite podcast app or on our website here.

In 1944, Frida Kahlo is at a crossroads, both in terms of her health and her career. In April of that year, with World War II dragging on, she writes to her gallerist—and former lover—Julien Levy. In this tender and personal letter, she moves from the logistical challenges of sending art across national borders during wartime, to describing her painful new steel corsets, to asking after her many friends in New York, where Levy lives. Unpacking this letter and exploring Kahlo’s words written in her own hand provides a new understanding of an artist who has become larger than life in the years since her death at age 47.

In this episode of Recording Artists: Intimate Addresses, host Tess Taylor highlights Kahlo’s vibrant personality, tracing how her artistic career developed alongside her long-running health struggles and her now-iconic style and persona. Anna Deavere Smith voices the letter. Photographer and poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whose work often addresses pain and the body, provides her artist’s insight while historian Circe Henestrosa, who co-curated the Kahlo exhibition Making Herself Up at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2018, shares charming anecdotes and important details of Kahlo’s life.

For transcripts, images, and additional resources visit our website.

In Season 2 of Getty's podcast series Recording Artists, titled Intimate Addresses, each episode unpacks one letter from one artist, including Marcel Duchamp, Frida Kahlo, M. C. Richards, Benjamin Patterson, Nam June Paik, and Meret Oppenheim. Anna Deavere Smith reads the letters while our host, poet Tess Taylor, speaks with modern-day creators and historians to explore the artists’ lives. The season launches September 26, 2023. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app or learn more on our website here.

“I think you can see that from my work, that I try to put everything I know in there and everything I don’t know. I’m looking for stuff that I don’t know, in that pursuit of, like, a daily practice.”

Terrance Hayes is fascinated by creating records of daily life. With a background in visual art and poetry, he has a nuanced understanding of what constitutes writing and reading across mediums. His work as a teacher also touches everything he does.

In this episode, hosted by Getty Research Institute associate curator Dr. LeRonn Brooks, Hayes discusses his creative practice, as well as the possibilities of radical imagination in recording one’s life.

Hayes is professor of creative writing at New York University. He is the author of the National Book Award finalist How to Be Drawn (Penguin, 2015) and Lighthead (2010), which won the 2010 National Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His numerous honors include a Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, United States Artists, the Guggenheim, and the MacArthur Foundation.

For images, transcripts, and more, visit https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/art-and-poetry-recording-everyday-life/ or http://www.getty.edu/podcasts

To learn more about Terrance Hayes, visit https://terrancehayes.com/

“What I tell my students—and most of them are writers—is that the only way for them to get to a place where they’re making what they should be making, writing what they should be writing, is to work from a place of courage.”

Claudia Rankine is a skilled poet, playwright, essayist, and professor. She explores, across genres, how the act of witnessing is necessary in maintaining the social contract. During this period of immense global change, witnessing as an act is a powerful act for artists, who can incisively question the moral trajectory of a nation.

In this episode, hosted by Getty Research Institute associate curator Dr. LeRonn Brooks, Rankine shares her thoughts on the role art and artists play in determining the course of history, her approach to teaching a new generation of artists, and the importance of introspection and intention in shaping our collective future.

Rankine is professor of creative writing at New York University. She is the author of three plays and six collections, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; she has also edited several anthologies, including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Her most recent book is Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf, 2020). She is a recipient of numerous awards and honors, including MacArthur, Lannan Foundation, and Guggenheim fellowships.

For images, transcripts, and more, visit https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/art-and-poetry-how-to-witness-the-world/ or http://www.getty.edu/podcasts

To learn more about Claudia Rankine, visit https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/claudia-rankine.html

“African American history is American history. You can’t tell it without talking about the contributions, the questions, the very heart of the creativity of African American culture.”

As a poet and director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture , Kevin Young thinks a lot about how African American culture is a crucial part of American culture. From blues music to poetry, from cakewalk dances to Black Twitter, Young draws connections across time as he discusses a wide range of art forms and cultural phenomena.

In this episode, hosted by Getty Research Institute associate curator Dr. LeRonn Brooks, Young discusses his poetry and the visibility and influence of African American art across mediums and history.

Young is the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the poetry editor of The New Yorker. He has published fifteen books of poetry and prose and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and MacDowell Colony. He was also finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

For images, transcripts, and more, visit https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/art-and-poetry-connecting-stories-at-the-national-museum-of-african-american-history-and-culture/ or http://www.getty.edu/podcasts

To learn more about Kevin Young, visit https://kevinyoungpoetry.com/

“Culture isn’t just dead stones and statues; culture is life. Culture is, you know, all the ways in which we move and interact together as peoples.”

In 2005, the United Nations agreed to a new framework called Responsibility to Protect (R2P) aimed at preventing genocide and crimes against humanity. However, this norm neglected to protect cultural heritage explicitly, despite the fact that the destruction of cultural heritage, including intangible heritage such as traditions and religious practices, often goes hand in hand with ethnic cleansing. This dynamic is playing out today in Xinjiang China, home to the ethnic minority Uyghur people.

In this episode, former Getty President Jim Cuno speaks with Simon Adams, president and CEO of the Center for Victims of Torture, and Rachel Harris, expert on Uyghur culture and professor of ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London, about the role of the UN in protecting cultural heritage in times of crisis and the current case of the Uyghur people in China. Adams and Harris are contributors to the recent publication Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities, edited by Jim Cuno and Thomas G. Weiss and available free of charge from Getty Publications.

For images, transcripts, and more, visit https://www.getty.edu/podcasts/art-and-ideas/cultural-heritage-under-attack-the-united-nations-and-uyghur-china or http://www.getty.edu/podcasts

To read Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities, visit https://www.getty.edu/publications/cultural-heritage-mass-atrocities/