Last month, the Getty announced that the Getty Conservation Institute’s Reference Collection and the Getty Research Institute (GRI) Special Collections had acquired the archive of Raymond Pettibon. Whether you’re a fan of Pettibon’s high art or his album covers for Sonic Youth and Black Flag, you can’t argue that this archive could have a better home. The donation comes to Southern California’s foremost institute from an artist whose work is inextricably linked with the region. We caught up with Glenn Phillips, senior curator of modern and contemporary collections and head of exhibitions at the Getty Research Institute, to hear more about this important gift.

First, huge congratulations on obtaining this archive. I can imagine no better place for it. How did these discussions begin? 

We have had a long relationship with Raymond, dating back not just to current people here but also former directors and curators. He was part of an exhibition at the GRI in 1992 called Connections: Explorations in the Getty Center Collections by Raymond Pettibon, Ed Ruscha, Alexis Smith and Buzz Spector, and he donated forty-three drawings to us after the show. We have long been building our collections of Raymond’s zines and artist’s books, and in general, Xerox art is a big collecting area for us. Raymond was our artist in residence in 2003-04 for our “Markets and Value” theme year, in part because he originally studied economics. The archive includes a lot of his research about the art market that he undertook while in residence at the Getty. In 2010, Raymond also donated a great set of original posters and concert flyers to us. So he has been a great and generous friend to us for many years now, and of course, we were thrilled when he wanted to discuss donating the archive to the GRI and the Getty Conservation Institute.

Can you give me a sense of the archive in terms of quantity? I recall Pettibon’s incredible show at the New Museum in 2017, and he strikes me as someone who has produced a great number of drawings over the years. 

Thirty-two boxes and a surfboard! The archive includes a small selection of unfinished and process drawings. Raymond has indeed been prolific. The archive contains a very nice selection of prints, but in general, it documents his research, working methods, and source material. Then we have some examples of limited-edition merchandise featuring his imagery, including a surfboard and several examples of skateboard decks.

It’s fantastic that this archive is going to live in Los Angeles. How would you describe its relationship to the city? 

It’s as related to the city as Raymond is, so I would say quite close! However, it also documents his exhibitions internationally and his research interests, which are quite broad. Of course, Raymond studied art and interacted with artists from all over the world.

What are some of the more unexpected objects in the archive?

See above regarding the surfboard, but the painting materials—consisting of paint tubes, ink jars and a reference surfer drawing he made with some of the donated paints—are a little uncommon for an artist’s archive. The paints and inks include a range of makers, while the reference drawing contains a small painted wave and surfer, Lorem ipsum text, palette squares of the colors used, and Color Index codes. These materials will be used by conservation scientists to conduct technical studies of his materials and working methods in the future.

To what extent will you be working with the artist on cataloguing this material? 

We worked carefully with him before the archive came here to ensure that we understood the organization of the material, and we took notes while we were with him in person. So he has already been helping us before the materials even came here, and we always work as closely as we can with artists when cataloguing an archive.

To some, this punky, surfer material might seem an unexpected acquisition for an institution as distinguished as the Getty. What else exists in the Getty Research Institute Special Collections that might surprise some people?

We have been collecting radical avant-gardes since the earliest days of the GRI, and there is plenty of wildness in our Dada and surrealism collections. But we also have Rodin’s house key, Claes Oldenburg’s childhood drawings and a great collection of his ray guns. There is plenty of intersection with punk, new wave, and early hip hop in the archive of The Kitchen. We’ll be showing original Gorilla masks from the Guerrilla Girls this fall; we have Machine Project’s floor, the permanent (hair curling) machine that Harald Szeemann’s grandfather invented. We have Dieter Roth’s cheese and urine books, a dead “Fluxmouse” preserved in liquid.

How will history remember Raymond Pettibon? 

We are excited for people to study the whole sweep of his career—not just the early punk stuff or the larger-scale stuff that the market loves, but the entire sweep, which is broad and has shown lots of development over time.