Glenn Phillips, Curator and Head of Modern and Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute, and Melissa Huddleston, Assistant Conservator, will discuss the process of reconstructing Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us, a herculean endeavor that brings together seven years of intensive research and over fifteen hundred original objects.

Glenn Phillips is Curator and Head of Modern and Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Prior to working at the GRI, he was Assistant Curator for Special Projects at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he worked on the 1997, 2000, and 2002 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, as well as The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000. Phillips was a member of the core organizational team for Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, a series of over sixty concurrent exhibitions that were held across Southern California from fall 2011 to spring 2012. In the fall of 2017, as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, he curated Video Art in Latin America with Elena Shtromberg, a thematic survey held at LAXART, which featured over sixty artists from twenty-one countries working with video from the 1960s to present.

Melissa Huddleston is an artist based in Los Angeles. Born and raised in Elm Springs, Arkansas, she studied painting at Western Washington University with Ed Bereal. Her paintings and drawings explore notions of personal and group identity, across real and imagined communities. She is a member of the board at Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, and works as an Assistant Conservator at the Getty Research Institute.