LOS ANGELES – It is finally done. Despite delays caused by a fossil discovery and a disorienting pandemic. Despite the challenge of raising US$724 million (S$920 million) in a city that can be cool towards cultural philanthropy.
Despite occasional bellyaching by the architect and biting pushback from critics.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is about to open its new David Geffen Galleries, two decades after its director Michael Govan began talking to Swiss architect Peter Zumthor about creating a museum for the 21st century.
Whatever the public and critics ultimately think of the 347,500 sq ft amoeba that audaciously crosses Wilshire Boulevard, 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 Mr Glenn Lowry, the long-time director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
The new LACMA, which opens to members in the coming weeks and to the general public on May 4, is momentous not only because of its long and often bumpy road, but also because it seeks to reinvent what an encyclopaedic museum means in the modern era.
Gone are the traditional organising 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 one another.
The building’s curvilinear walls encourage visitors to wander, determining their own paths without any dictated order. The galleries are spread out across a single level, a deliberately non-hierarchical 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,” Mr Govan, 62, said during a recent walk-through. “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 coloured-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 Ms Holly Mitchell, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
“The transparent flat design not only makes everyone feel welcome, but it also creates a structural equity in the art world.”
Mr 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, having 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 (US$422 million) and MoMA’s 2019 expansion (US$450 million), which both cost about US$550 million in today’s dollars.
Los Angeles County contributed US$125 million to the project, and Mr Govan secured significant contributions from media mogul David Geffen (US$150 million) and his trustees – namely, casino magnate Elaine Wynn (US$50 million) and Mr Tony Ressler, along with Mr Ressler’s wife, Ms Jami Gertz (US$50 million). LACMA also received a significant art collection in the summer of 2025.
But the museum’s transformation has had its share of sceptics 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.
Mr Govan has countered that the new building’s 110,000 sq ft of exhibition space replaces the ageing 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 Mr Zumthor openly resisted, the Pritzker-winning architect said he was satisfied with the outcome. “I have realised my vision.”
With its solid grey concrete walls, interior galleries in earthy tones of red and blue, and etchings in the plaza paving, the building is designed to feel ancient and new.
“We wanted people to see that this is handmade not by God, but by human beings,” Mr 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 and 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, Mr Govan said, which 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 theatre to encourage activity throughout the day.
In this spirit of engagement, Jeff Koons’ blooming colossus Split-Rocker – equal parts pony and dinosaur – stands sentinel over the Wilshire Boulevard plaza.
Jeff Koons’ Split-Rocker gets last-minute tweaks at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles.
PHOTO: DAMIEN MALONEY/NYTIMES
A colourful video installation by Diana Thater sprawls across an outdoor wall, inspired by Monet’s Giverny garden. Pedro Reyes’ looming stone head is a nod to Olmec culture and a potential “selfie magnet”, Mr 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 Ms 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.
A staff member touches up a work by the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany, a 15th-century Florentine painter, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
PHOTO: DAMIEN MALONEY/NYTIMES
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.
Ms 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.
Mr Bobby Kotick, who recruited Mr Govan to LACMA, credited the director with thinking big, citing also the commission of Michael Heizer’s 340-tonne (308,443kg) boulder. “Those projects wouldn’t exist without his force of will,” he said.
Mr 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 American celebrities Leonardo DiCaprio and Kim Kardashian to a red carpet that has been called the Met Gala of the West Coast.
Mr Govan has also helped lead a national movement among museums to emphasise 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?” NYTIMES
