Getty Research Institute

So you can, when it's unrolled in front of you, if you're lucky enough to have that experience, the alchemical processes just kind of undulate.

And I got to see, I've seen a couple of them, but I got to see the Ripley Scroll at the Getty Research Institute in person.

I made an appointment to visit with it so I could write this book.

I wanted to actually be with one of these scrolls.

The dealer who sold Mia the Chakmul was a guy named Earl Stendhal, a guy from small-town Wisconsin who moved to L.A., starts selling art, and eventually, as World War II is heating up, stumbles into a niche, pre-Columbian art.

The Stendhal Gallery is closed in 2017, and their archives are now at the Getty Research Institute in L.A., Mary Miller, a scholar of pre-Columbian art, is now the director there and has spent more time than most thinking about Earl Stendhal in the early era of collecting.

She says a fair number of those pieces that Stendhal trafficked in, along with legitimate artworks, were looted or forged, were spliced together from disparate pieces.

He had a gift, she says, for gluing broken-off heads or arms onto broken torsos.

You know, his, his very particular relationship to the, the different shades of black and how he's applying and manipulating black media, really thinking of it as this, this full spectrum of color in a really distinctive way.

And so I, I sort of took that opportunity to, to delve deeply into the materials of what we had here, which was a mix of charcoal drawings and pastels, and then at the Getty Research Institute, just, you know, 500 feet away from my desk, a really wonderful collection of lithographs, and getting to compare sort of how he's applying all of these different mediums.

And so Redon really took such close care to what materials he was using, and particularly the relationship between his materials and his supports was something, the, the fixative that he's using to affix his charcoal and his pastel to his sheets, all of these things that really make his objects.

He's, he's very interested in how the process and the materials are the work itself, which was something that, that I just loved getting to delve into.

The remainder of the estate was safeguarded in the family home under the care of his widow and then his granddaughter, Karen E. Hudson.

In time, Hudson would show the materials to Maristella Casciato, curator of architecture at the Getty Research Institute, and Leron P. Brooks, who leads its African American Art History Initiative.

The Getty curators met Hudson at the storage unit at the Grove, a popular mall, in early 2020, and remember the thrill of unrolling one meticulous Williams drawing after another.

In all, there were original drawings, renderings, plans, or blueprints for about 1,800 projects, which the Getty soon acquired in a joint agreement with the architect's alma mater, the University of Southern California.

Now for the first time, these curators from the Getty, joined by others from USC and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, are using this material to help tell a richer and deeper story of a black architect who broke the color barrier in Southern California by building a thriving practice and extraordinary homes, hospitals, and more, despite the overt racism of his time.

Each institution is staging its own show this season on Williams.

The USC Fisher Museum of Arts opened August 18th, LACMA's opened November 15th, and the Getty's on December 15th.

Most of the curators admitted they had not heard of Williams until they moved to California.