Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980 was a scholarly initiative funded by the
J. Paul Getty Trust to historicize the contributions to contemporary art history of artists, curators, critics, and others based in
Los Angeles. Planned for nearly a decade, PST, as it was called, granted nearly 60 organizations throughout
Southern California a total of $10 million to produce
exhibitions (on view between September 2011 and April 2012) that explored the years between 1945 and 1980.[1][2] Underscoring the significance of this project, art critic
Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times:
Before [PST], we knew a lot [about the history of contemporary art], and that lot tended to greatly favor New York. A few Los Angeles artists were highly visible and unanimously revered, namely
Ed Ruscha and other denizens of the
Ferus Gallery, that supercool locus of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s, plus
Bruce Nauman and
Chris Burden, but that was about it. After, we know a whole lot more, and the balance is much more even. One of the many messages delivered by this profusion of what will eventually be nearly 70 museum exhibitions is that New York did not act alone in the postwar era. And neither did those fabulous Ferus boys.[3]
ARTnews named the initiative as the decade's most important exhibition and cited how its archival research project had already impacted the history of art by the end of the decade through multiple exhibitions of historically underrepresented work.[4]