Alumna Discusses Art, Monumentality in Getty Center Talk

Last Friday Zoe Appleby (’18) presented a research paper, “Exploring the Public Museum as an Urban Monument: LACMA and the Zumthor Debates,” at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. A graduate student in art history at the University of California, Riverside, Miss Appleby delivered her presentation as part of a seminar class at the Getty Research Institute, “Monumentality and its Discontents.” She was one of only nine students accepted into the graduate-level class, drawn from diverse departments, all related to the study of art and architecture, at universities from throughout Southern California. 

“The L.A. County Museum of Art has planned in the near future to demolish most of its main buildings and build one new complex in their place. It has hired the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor to design the new campus,” says Miss Appleby, explaining her research project, paper, and presentation. “I used this perhaps historic event to explore, philosophically, the ways in which a public museum can be considered an urban monument and related issues. The main issues I investigated were the museum as a monument to what it houses (the art), as a monument to the city it belongs to (Los Angeles), as a built environment for people to engage with inside and outside, how the museum interacts with its immediate urban environment, and the debate over whether museums have a duty to preserve their own past as embodied in the layers of their architecture.”

Her Thomas Aquinas College education, Miss Appleby reports, has been a blessing as she pursues her graduate studies. “I use my TAC training in textual analysis, in Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, in Greco-Roman history, in modern philosophy (such as Kant and Hegel), in poetry and literary theory, in Aristotelian cosmology,” she writes. “I could go on and on.”