By Abby Schultz

Katherine Fleming is a modern Greek historian who went from an academic career as provost of New York University to become president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust in 2022.

Today, Fleming oversees a $9.45 billion endowment that funds four Getty visual arts institutions in Los Angeles -- a foundation, a conservation institute, a research institute, and the Getty Museum. The museum includes the Getty Center -- focused on pre-20th-century European art and photography from the 1800s to today -- and the Getty Villa, which focuses on the arts of ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria.

The job puts Fleming on the global stage, whether helping to preserve the art of Ukraine, or teaming with London's National Portrait Galley to buy Joshua Reynolds Portrait of Mai, circa 1776, for GBP50 million ($62 million). But she also plays a local role, as when the Palisades Fire touched the grounds of the Getty Villa in Malibu in January, although the flames ultimately didn't threaten the museum.

Barron's recently met with Fleming in New York to talk about the Getty's role in the global cultural conversation, how to handle a moment when arts and culture are under financial and political threats, and the sparks that led her to study Greek history.

An edited version of the conversation follows.

Barron's : How is being a Greek historian relevant to the Getty?

Katherine Fleming: A significant part of the Getty's core collection, as J. Paul Getty had conceived of it, is classical antiquities. We have Greek, Roman, Etruscan and some Egyptian antiquities. One of the things that I worked on as a historian is something called reception theory, which is the ways in which the classical past is reprocessed in modernity. Why does your local bank have columns in front of it? This is neoclassical architecture, which is designed to conjure up the classical Greek and Roman past and the heft and seriousness of it.

There is a modern artist, Cy Twombly, who was important and spent much of his career in Italy. He was interested in Roman antiquities. He had them all over his fabulous house. He said something like, 'The ancient, by definition, is always modern because we can only see it in our own moment.' You may be looking at an object that is 23,000 years old, but you're looking at it in your contemporary moment, which renders it contemporary as well.

There's a good story about why you became interested in Greece.

The official story is that I had a transformative experience as an undergraduate. I studied at Barnard College at Columbia and wound up studying comparative religion, focusing on early Christianity and the formation of Christianity as a religion. I was an undergraduate during a period when an important set of texts had just been translated into English out of Coptic. It was a set of documents that had been found in Nag Hammadi in Egypt and ultimately wound up being translated by a team of researchers at Claremont [the college's Institute for Antiquity and Christianity].

They were alternative gospel accounts of the life of Jesus. An important scholar, Elaine Pagels, wrote a book called The Gnostic Gospels and argued why [these accounts] had been suppressed -- that they expressed versions of the life of Jesus that didn't fly with the nascent church hierarchy. I found that fascinating.

That is one thread of why I became interested in things Greek, because the New Testament is written in Koine [common] Greek. But really, the reason that I became interested in modern Greek stuff is because I went on vacation to Crete through random happenstance in the spring of my sophomore year and wound up in a teeny village with no electricity at the time. There was a taverna where I hung out every night, and before I left, the guy who owned it said he needed a waitress who spoke English. In an impulsive but ultimately consequential move, I said, 'I'm going to go do my exams, and then I'm going to take a year off college and I'm going to come and be your waitress.' Which I did, and it completely shaped the rest of my life.

What do you see as your role in the global conversation around culture and philanthropy?

Many people think of our cultural heritage, historic sites, as somehow not theirs. They think of it as belonging to some elite that understands it. But it belongs to all of us. We are a wealthy private foundation. But everything that we have in our museum, we have for the public. It isn't a private collection.

These four programs -- a foundation that makes grants, a conservation institute that does exactly what you think, a research institute and then a museum that is a public facing element of the institution -- try collectively to convey the different ways in which art and cultural heritage belong to the world. The digital aspect is important too, because we recognize most people aren't going to make it to Southern California. We are effectively the Library of Congress for Art. We have a massive library and extensive collections of primary materials. And all of those are available through open access.

There's [also] a cultural, diplomatic dimension to what I do.

What are some examples of this?

Through our foundation and our conservation institute, we work with organizations such as Aliph [the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas] that are engaged in areas where cultural heritage is under threat -- Gaza, Ukraine...The standard best practice is no longer to remove things from these zones, because of the fear that it will degenerate into a form of plunder or that it will be difficult to ever repatriate. We've participated in schemes that involve burying materials to safeguard them somewhere else within the territory.

We annually host the Getty Global Forum. It's an off-the-record gathering of 30 to 40 people from around the world across sectors. We're able to have intense, open conversations about all kinds of stuff and put people together who might not otherwise have the chance to get together. We've seen that it has created all kinds of relationships between participants.

The museums have always been free. Still, how do you get the broader public to walk in the door?

The Getty Center is this majestic, slightly mysterious looking white travertine building on a hill in one of the most expensive neighborhoods of Los Angeles. On the one hand -- and we don't want this -- but it can feel like a metaphor for the idea of an art fortress. But if you look at it another way, you can say we are a resource for anybody who wants to come here. It has these commanding views that are difficult to find in the city. It has a beautiful garden created by [the late artist] Robert Irwin. It has an outdoor sculpture park. To get from the parking garage up to the center itself, you ride a tram, which is itself a kind of wacky, magical experience. Then we have these rolling lawns where people can hang out and have picnics.

We're trying to lean into the Getty, particularly the Getty Center, as a welcoming, fun place to go hang out. We are undertaking an overhaul of the visitor experience. I'm adding elements that engage from the moment of arrival. Why not have some cool plushy furniture on the lawn? Why don't we have some retail and food and cultural programming? I joke that my big accomplishment as president is we now have a bar. We're trying to make more of the fact that we have this huge, sprawling site.

An initiative of yours is a capital improvement program with a ballpark cost between $600,000 and $800,000.

The Getty Center is pretty much at the end of its life span, from a mechanical standpoint. It's almost 30 years old. We're going to need a new energy facility and are talking about how to do that in a way that would maximally decarbonize things and may also give us incremental space. We're redoing our decorative arts galleries. We're redoing our air handling systems.

Have you started?

We've started elements of it. We're going to move to all electric. We've contracted with someone to do our new tram -- it's going to look like a space-age caterpillar. I would like the Getty Center to be lighted up at night. We are one of the few facilities that is visible from across broad swaths of the city. I would like us to look a little more like a welcoming presence.

How is the Getty navigating a difficult time for arts and culture?

We are acutely aware of what is going on in the sector. We have a close relationship with the Smithsonian. We have a project that we're doing with NMAAHC [the Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture] around the Johnson Publishing Company [producer of the magazines Ebony and Jet] archive. Some people with whom we work daily are in the eye of the storm. We ourselves are trying, and I think succeeding, to not be reactive. We already have a clear mission to support a broad array of practitioners across the visual arts. We have a targeted philanthropy strategy at our foundation and spend a lot of time figuring out where we're going to have the biggest impact through our grant making.

No matter how wealthy we are, even if we were to decide that it was our job to plug the gaps, that's a strategy that would only last so long and would take us away from our own thought-through strategies. Frankly, arts and culture should be receiving federal funding. If everybody were to rush in and plug all the gaps, that would convey a message that maybe some people want to have -- like, oh yeah, this should all be the private sector.

We have a clearly articulated, formal policy of freedom of expression and institutional neutrality. We're not going to make political statements through what we do, and we're not we're not going do things because someone is telling us we ought to. We're not going to not do things because someone is telling us, we ought not to. Whatever the artistic equivalent of a moral compass is, we have that.

What was it like when the Palisades Fire touched the Getty Villa grounds?

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