Getty has acquired the archive of American artist Raymond Petitbon. Pettibon, who became known in the 1980s for his work in the Southern California music scene, particularly through posters and album covers, later gained widespread recognition in the fine art world.
His distinctive visual language incorporates an eclectic range of American cultural and historical references, blending elements from popular culture, literature, sports, politics, and religion. His most iconic works synthesize crashing waves, surfers riding the tube, and sardonic text extracted and repurposed from literary sources.
The archive was donated to the Getty Conservation Institute’s Reference Collection and Getty Research Institute Special Collections.
The Reference Collection will house paint tubes and ink jars related to his materials and techniques, while the bulk of the archive will be housed at the Getty Reserch Institute. The archive includes handwritten notes, zine mockup pages, original screenprints and linocuts, screenprinted skateboard decks and a surfboard, concert flyers, printed ephemera for exhibitions and events, among many other items.
The collection significantly enhances the Getty's collections of reference materials and archives relating to Pettibon, who has previously donated drawings, zines, and concert flyers starting in 1992. Overall, the archive builds strongly on the Getty’s collections of Southern California art history, while also moving the collections chronologically forward with an artist whose mature works developed in the 1980s and 90s. The materials will be particularly useful to conservators and scholars, as they reveal much about Pettibon’s working methods, processes, and use of source materials. Pettibon was artist in residence at the GRI for its 2003-04 theme year “Markets and Value,” and the archive includes his extensive notes and research conducted during the residency
“This acquisition ensures that Pettibon's legacy will be preserved and made accessible for future generations of scholars, curators, and artists, allowing them to better understand the intersection of culture, politics, and personal narrative in his work,” says Glenn Phillips, Chief Curator of the Getty Research Institute
Raymond Pettibon (né Raymond Ginn) was born in 1957 in Tucson, Arizona and primarily grew up in Hermosa Beach, California. The artist’s nom de plume, Pettibon, sometimes spelled Pettibone in very early works, was coined by his father.
Pettibon graduated from UCLA at the age of 19 with a bachelor’s degree in Economics. Throughout the late 1970s he immersed himself in drawing, reading, and writing. It was during this period that he became involved with the music and bands associated with his brother, Greg Ginn, founder of the punk rock bank Black Flag. Pettibon designed Black Flag’s iconic four bar logo and contributed drawings for that band’s concert flyers and album covers as well as for other bands such as Sonic Youth and Minutemen.
Working across media that includes prints, drawings, paintings, video, zines, and Xerox art, Pettibon is among the most prominent artists to emerge from Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s. He was included in iconic survey exhibitions of Southern California art such as Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His retrospective Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work was presented at the New Museum in 2017.
Anna Melnykova, "Palace of Labor (palats praci), architector I. Pretro, 1916", shot with analog Canon camera, 35 mm Fuji film in March 2022.
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