It’s finally done.
Despite delays caused by a fossil discovery and a disorienting pandemic.
Despite the challenge of raising $724 million in a city that can be cool to cultural philanthropy.
Despite occasional bellyaching by the architect and biting pushback from critics.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is about to open its new David Geffen Galleries, two decades after its director, Michael Govan, began talking to the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor about creating a museum for the 21st century. Whatever the public and critics ultimately think of the 347,500-square-foot amoeba that audaciously crosses Wilshire Boulevard — and will soon anchor a new subway stop — leaders in the art world consider it a major milestone for the cultural life of the country.
“This is one of the most important museum buildings to have been completed in the last quarter-century by virtue of its scale, ambition, quality and promise,” said Glenn D. Lowry, the longtime director of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
The new LACMA, which opens to members in the coming weeks and to the general public May 4, is momentous not only because of its long and often bumpy road, but because it is seeking to reinvent what an encyclopedic museum means in the modern era.
Gone are the traditional organizing categories of chronology, geography and medium: paintings, sculpture, photography, prints. Instead the galleries are delineated by bodies of water — the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans — that flow into each other.
The building’s curvilinear walls encourage visitors to wander, determining their own path without any dictated order. The galleries are spread out across a single level, a deliberately nonhierarchical space in which no kind of art is ranked more highly than another.
“This is intended to be a cabinet of curiosities that brings things together,” Govan, 62, said during a walk-through this week. “It’s intended to make your mind look at all the different perspectives around you. That is very much about our moment: Look at everything.”
Artworks in the Pacific area, for example, encompass both an Indonesian memorial statue from the 14th or 15th century and a colored pencil portrait from 2023 by Shizu Saldamando, an American artist of Japanese and Mexican ancestry. Within the ocean segments are also galleries devoted to themes: “Picturing the American West” features a 2016 print from Richard Prince’s Marlboro Man cowboy series and a gelatin silver print from Laura Gilpin’s 1949 photography book on the Rio Grande.
“It is signifying a sea change, a culture shift at an interesting time in our nation’s history — the physical structure of older museums being oppressive,” said Holly J. Mitchell, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. “The transparent flat design not only makes everyone feel welcome, it also creates a structural equity in the art world.”
Govan’s legacy is bound up with the Geffen Galleries. After helping to reinvent museum structures at the Dia Art Foundation, the Guggenheim and Mass MoCA, he came to LACMA in 2006 resolved to create a new building that would attract visitors as well as crucial donations of art and money.
The project was considerably more expensive than the Whitney Museum’s 2015 building in New York ($422 million) and MoMA’s 2019 expansion ($450 million), which both cost about $550 million in today’s dollars.
Los Angeles County contributed $125 million to the project and Govan secured significant contributions from the media mogul David Geffen ($150 million) and his trustees, namely the casino magnate Elaine Wynn ($50 million) and Tony Ressler along with his wife Jami Gertz ($50 million). LACMA also received a significant art collection last summer.
But the museum’s transformation has had its share of skeptics who have argued that the Geffen Galleries are overly radical and financially reckless in using taxpayer money without expanding the museum. The harsh headlines over the years included “LACMA: Suicide by Architecture” and “LACMA, the Incredible Shrinking Museum.”
The Ahmanson Foundation, long a generous donor to LACMA, suspended future gifts because it worried that European masterpieces would end up in storage.
Govan has countered that the new building’s 110,000 square feet of exhibition space replaces the aging structures that were demolished and that he has doubled the size of LACMA’s exhibition space overall in the past 20 years.
While there were cost-saving adjustments that Zumthor openly resisted, the Pritzker-winning architect said he was satisfied with the outcome: “I have realized my vision.”
With its solid gray concrete walls, interior galleries in earthy tones of red and blue and etchings in the plaza paving, the building is designed to feel both ancient and new. “We wanted people to see that this is handmade not by God, but by human beings,” Zumthor said.
The museum’s galleries are filled with artwork from around the globe but never lose sight of Los Angeles.
The city is almost consistently visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows, veiled by sheer metallic curtains (designed by Reiko Sudo) that protect light-sensitive artworks. Works by living Los Angeles artists (Liz Glynn and Todd Gray) anchor the two entrances. California iconography comes through in vintage surfboards; a gallery focused on plastic in art; and images of car culture, including an actual Studebaker Avanti from 1963.
Natural light is its own central character — with an entire installation devoted to consideration of the weather, seasons and shadows. “We invite you to linger, and return at different times of the day or year,” says a wall label, “to notice how the light changes.”
The building also invites a direct experience with art by presenting objects, Govan said, “that are kid-friendly that you can also give an hour lecture about.” There is a restaurant, a coffee house, a wine bar, a bookshop and a theater to encourage activity throughout the day.
In this spirit of engagement, Jeff Koons’s blooming colossus “Split-Rocker” — equal parts pony and dinosaur — stands sentinel over the Wilshire Boulevard plaza. A colorful video installation by Diana Thater sprawls across an outdoor wall, inspired by Monet’s Giverny garden. Pedro Reyes’s looming stone head is both a nod to Olmec culture and a potential “selfie magnet,” Govan said.
Curators are hopeful that visitors will feel the lines between past and present constantly blurring. Lauren Halsey’s newly commissioned sphinx stretches out near a Greco-Roman statue from the second century, while June Wayne’s 1970s tidal waves crash near Katsushika Hokusai’s “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa” from the 1800s.
“We’ve been able to keep the structure and the beauty and people being able to learn about history but we’ve made it more expansive — not just European and colonial in nature,” said Leah Lehmbeck, who leads the museum’s departments of European Painting and Sculpture and American Art.
Founded in 1910 in Exposition Park, LACMA grew out of the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art and officially opened at its current address in 1965. The original campus featured modernist pavilions around a central plaza. LACMA added the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and Chris Burden’s “Urban Light” installation in 2008, and the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion in 2010.
With satellites planned for South Los Angeles and Las Vegas — as well as partnerships with the Yuz Museum Shanghai and Qatar Museums — LACMA has also argued for moving beyond a single edifice and bringing art to different audiences in various locations.
Lynda Resnick, who with her husband, Stewart, donated the Koons, called the new building “the Bilbao of the 21st century,” referring to Frank Gehry’s tourist-attracting Guggenheim in Spain. Bobby Kotick, who recruited Govan to LACMA, credited the director with thinking big, citing also the commission of Michael Heizer’s 340-ton boulder. “Those projects wouldn’t exist without his force of will,” Kotick said.
Govan’s energy has helped make LACMA an increasingly respected catalyst for new galleries and other museum projects, solidifying the city’s bona fides as a cultural hub. He has made philanthropy glamorous with the annual Art + Film Gala, which attracts the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kim Kardashian to a red carpet that has been called the Met Gala of the West Coast.
Govan has also helped lead a national movement among museums to emphasize flexibility in how artwork is presented and experienced.
“If you’re going to enhance relevance for these objects, then you have to let them be free,” he said. “History is always changing — how we read it, what we pick out. So why not create a platform that can always change?”
Robin Pogrebin, who has been a reporter for The Times for 30 years, covers arts and culture.
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