The number of works by women artists at The Getty Center is growing. In this self-guide, we bring your attention to a selection of works of art by women on view this spring: three paintings, one drawing, one sculpture, and works by two contemporary artists.

The contemporary artwork includes:

• A mural-sized digital image on glass by the Los Angeles-based artist Judith F. Baca commissioned by The Getty in 2022;

• and works by California performance artist Barbara T. Smith spanning five decades of her life. Smith’s artwork is found in the exhibition The Way to Be, now on view at The Getty Research Institute (GRI) (28 February–16 July 2023).

If we consider the selection of works by women artists on view at The Getty Center today, nearly 450 years separate the earliest artwork by Lavinia Fontana, done between 1575–1580, from the most recent artwork completed by Baca in 2022. The historical artists are as follows.

• Lavinia Fontana (Italian, b. 1552, Bologna–d. 1614, Rome);

• Artemisia Gentileschi (Italian, b. 1593, Rome–d. after 1654, Naples);

• Luisa Roldán (Spanish, b. 1652, Seville–d. 1706, Madrid);

• Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (French, b. 1755 Paris–d. 1842, Paris).

All were born into a family of artists and were then trained in the family workshop by their fathers. Even with their advantages, however, each female artist in this group of six had to overcome obstacles to her career as an artist. These obstacles ranged from the difficulty of balancing domestic expectations with professional pursuits to the lack of institutional interest in presenting – let alone collecting – their work.

Barbara T. Smith was born in 1931 in Pasadena, where she followed expectations for a middle-class woman by completing a college education with an emphasis on design and home economics, marrying at the age of 20, and giving birth to three children. It was in the 1960s that Smith’s world abruptly changed as she redirected her life to making art. She developed a radically new form of art — performance. The exhibition The Way to Be draws on Smith’s memoir (of the same title) to take the viewer through five decades of her performance art.

One of my favorite pieces of Smith’s entitled Intimations of Immortality (1974), is a performance that took place in two locations in Los Angeles — the Woman’s Building and MacArthur Park. For this piece, Smith traded places with three women who she met in the park, inviting each one to spend a day sitting on a bench in a gallery of the Woman’s Building while she took their place on a bench in the park. By trading places, each woman, including the artist, exchanged life experiences. In contrast to the artist, the women in the park were older, and the park offered refuge where they spent their days socializing and passing the time. In The Getty exhibition, there are photographs documenting the performance of the women from MacArthur Park in the gallery and a video of Smith talking with someone as she sits on a park bench.

Judith F. Baca, born in 1946 in Huntington Park, California, is a Chicana artist and educator known for her community-based practice of mural painting. Describing herself as a “political landscape painter,” Baca has spent over 50 years engaging with the land to address marginalized histories and identify collective possibilities. In the digital glass mural at The Getty Center, Baca engages the urban landscape in MacArthur Park. La Salsera (The Salsa Dancer) shows a giantess moving across the green parkland, dancing on her way to catch the bus. The dancer’s movements are fluid, like the flight of monarch butterflies that fill the outline of her body.

Baca’s mural is installed in the West Pavilion of The Getty Center, where it dominates the airy, light-filled space. Annually, monarch butterflies pass through The Getty Center as they migrate from the United States to Mexico. Unlike the butterflies, the group of Latina working women seen below the giantess have confronted boundaries that limit their movement. Baca’s urban landscape offers these women in the park a liminal space to inhabit and move through.