The Getty Turns to Mindfulness With a 12-Episode Podcast on Art and Breathing
The Getty in Los Angeles has launched an unusual new format for museum education: a 12-episode video podcast that pairs mindfulness exercises with works from its collection. Called Our Museum Mindfulness Meditation, or OMMM, the series is hosted by Getty gallery educator and meditation practitioner Lilit Sadoyan, who guides viewers through breathing, reflection, and close looking. New episodes will be released twice weekly.
The first installment centers on Vincent van Gogh’s *Irises* (1889), a painting that lends itself naturally to the project’s premise. Sadoyan appears cross-legged in a warm, burnt-orange room, surrounded by potted plants and candles, and uses the work as a starting point for a meditation on color, composition, and atmosphere. The Getty acquired *Irises* in 1990 from Australian tycoon Alan Bond, who had paid a then-record $54 million for the painting in 1987.
In the episode, Sadoyan describes the flowers as seeming to “sway in the wind” and to “absorb the bright light of the sun.” She also points to a detail that time has altered: the irises were once violet, but Van Gogh’s geranium lake red has faded. The painting’s missing horizon line, meanwhile, becomes part of the invitation to slow down and imagine the garden more fully — to feel the Provençal light, and to enter the scene rather than simply observe it.
That approach fits Van Gogh’s own experience in Saint-Rémy, southern France, where he was initially barred from leaving the asylum grounds and found solace in its garden. As he wrote to his brother Theo, he felt compelled to look closely at “a blade of grass” and “the branch of a fir tree” in order to calm himself. Read that way, OMMM frames mindfulness not as a contemporary add-on, but as a practice with deep art-historical roots.
The remaining episodes will feature works including Edvard Munch’s *Starry Night* (1893), a 15th-century astrological diagram, Théodore Rousseau’s woodland scene *Forest of Fontainebleau, Cluster of Tall Trees Overlooking the Plain of Clair-Bois at the Edge of Bas-Bréau* (c. 1849–52), and an Edgar Degas dancer. Each episode will also include bonus conversations with specialists such as a sleep historian, Buddhist monk, rock climber, or climate scientist.
The series arrives as research continues to suggest that engagement with art may support health and well-being. In that context, the Getty’s project reflects a broader shift in museum programming: one that treats looking as a form of attention, and attention as a kind of care.
