Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), museum campus in Los Angeles with distinguished collections of art from the ancient Americas, Asia, Europe, the Islamic world, and the modern and contemporary eras. LACMA is also home to a number of popular public artworks, including Chris Burden’s Urban Light and Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass. By the first quarter of the 21st century, LACMA held about 155,000 works of art.

(Read Sister Wendy’s Britannica essay on art appreciation.)

Early years

Established in 1910, LACMA was part of the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art until 1961, when it became an independent institution. It moved to its present location on Wilshire Boulevard, neighboring the La Brea Tar Pits, in 1965. It originally consisted of three buildings designed by William L. Pereira Associates, the largest of which was the four-level Ahmanson Building that housed the museum’s permanent collection. Also built in 1965 were the adjoining Hammer Building—which displayed special exhibitions—and the Bing Center, which contained a research library, a children’s gallery, a 600-seat auditorium, and a cafeteria. Early on the campus faced criticism for its small gallery spaces and confusing layout, problems that would plague the museum into the 21st century.

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Collection highlights

LACMA’s early collection had a number of strong pieces, including Diego Rivera’s Flower Day (Día de flores) (1925), and it has continued to acquire works that have contributed to the diversity of its holdings in terms of media, geography, and historical periods. Among the highlights are René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe) (1929), as well as Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Cézanne. The American collection ranges from Thomas Cole’s 19th-century landscapes to George Bellows’s urban scene Cliff Dwellers (1913) and Georgia O’Keeffe’s Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose (1931). LACMA’s holdings also include major examples of Islamic, South Asian, and East Asian art, such as a 10th-century luster-painted bowl from Iraq, 16th-century Ottoman Iznik tiles, and Korean screen paintings from the Joseon dynasty.

Expansions

By the 1980s LACMA’s art collection had outgrown the existing architecture, and the museum recognized a need for a new space to house its modern and contemporary art. The Art of the Americas Building (formerly the Robert O. Anderson Building) was designed by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates and opened in 1986. However, critics complained that the new building further complicated the confusing campus layout. Meanwhile, a large gift of Edo-period Japanese art required another building. The commission went to Bruce Goff, whose design for the Pavilion for Japanese Art opened in 1988, six years after his death.

Further additions were made in the 21st century, including the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (2008; not to be confused with The Broad, an art space commissioned by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad that was constructed in 2015 and located in downtown Los Angeles), the Resnick Pavilion (2010), and a number of subsidiary structures all designed by Renzo Piano. However, the new spaces did not alleviate LACMA’s circulation issues, and in 2013 the museum announced a controversial plan to raze the original 1965 Pereira buildings and the Art of the Americas Building to construct a space for the museum’s permanent collection that would be designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor.

Demolition began in 2020, and in 2026 Zumthor’s meandering amoeba-shaped structure opened to the public. The building, called the David Geffen Galleries, was described as a work of art itself and admired for its expansive windows and richly textured concrete. Critics were also largely appreciative of the curatorial decision to display the museum’s permanent collection around four major bodies of water—the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans, and the Mediterranean Sea—rather than the chronological layout traditionally used by museums.

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(Read Glenn Lowry’s Britannica essay on “Art Museums & Their Digital Future.”)