The Getty Center held its seventh annual Getty Graduate Symposium on Feb. 5, where uprising art history graduate students from multiple universities in California presented their research findings on little-explored areas, ranging from art installations in public spaces to Creole dance performances while on a beach.

Rebecca Peabody, who has led research projects and programs at the Getty Research Institute for 16 years, said, “We wanted to provide a platform to support emerging scholars, so this is an opportunity to do that. By presenting them to other graduate students and scholars across the state, they continue their mission of inspiring human connections and mutual understanding through art.”

Ashley McNelis is a graduate student from the University of California, Riverside.

“In the end, the journey is not as important as the goal of getting information about Mother Art and the other artists out there,” McNelis said.

McNelis covered a group of women artists from the seventies who set up art installations, such as a picture of a laundry machine on a woman’s shirt hung up in a park, to share the struggles everyday women faced in the day. “To highlight this collective, not just one-sided meaning that I have fallen in love with that I want others to know about as well,” she said.

“I know that there are a lot of scholarships, and I learned the hard way that you must talk to other human beings,” said Zane Casimir from the University of California, Irvine.

He shared his findings on the Japanese Avant-Garde movement, where artists did artistic displays such as painting their faces white or reading burning newspapers in train stations to blur the lines between art and reality.

“Part of the motivation for doing this is the need to move forward to become doctors, professors, and scholars going forward,” said Casimir. “If I only ever talk to myself doing the work, it’s never going to go very far.”

For anyone interested in connecting with the art they display, there are plenty more to see. They can see the “Our Voices, Our Getty: Reflecting on Manuscripts” Exhibition going from Feb. 4 to April 27, displaying medieval manuscripts from their collections for the first time and listening to how interns from the Getty Marrow Undergraduate Internship program interpret them for free. For any rising art scholars interested in doing their presentations someday, the Getty Center has its Getty Scholars program.