Get us in your inbox

Search

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

  • Museums
  • Miracle Mile
  • price 1 of 4
  • Recommended
  1. LACMA
    Photograph: Shutterstock/Min C. Chiu
  2. LACMA
    Photograph: Time Out/Michael Juliano
  3. LACMA
    Photograph: Time Out/Michael Juliano
  4. LACMA
    Photograph: Time Out/Michael Juliano
  5. LACMA
    Photograph: Time Out/Michael Juliano
Advertising

Time Out says

Timed tickets required. Free for L.A. County residents weekdays after 3pm. No tickets are required to see outdoor sculptures Urban Light and Levitated Mass.

Chris Burden’s Urban Light, a piece made up of 202 cast-iron street lamps gathered from around L.A. and restored to working order, has quickly become one of the city’s indelible landmarks over the past decade—and it’s inevitably what most visitors will identity the museum with. But you’d be selling yourself short if you don’t venture beyond the photo-friendly installation; LACMA’s collections boast modernist masterpieces, large-scale contemporary works (including Richard Serra’s massive swirling sculpture and Burden’s buzzing, hypnotic tangle of toy cars in Metropolis II), traditional Japanese screens and by far L.A.’s most consistently terrific special exhibitions.

While LACMA’s encyclopedic collections have long been the most impressive in the city, the 20-acre complex of buildings in which they’ve been housed has been quite the reverse. So the eastern half of the campus has been leveled with construction underway on a single-building replacement due to reopen in 2024. In the meantime, LACMA’s permanent collections have been scattered across the Renzo Piano-designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) and Resnick Pavilion (the much-loved modern collection specifically has been moved into the bright, spacious third-floor galleries in BCAM).

As for the art itself, you’ll see contemporary titans like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and local artist Ed Ruscha; familiar modernists like Picasso, Mondrian, Klee and Kandinsky; Impressionist and post-Impressionist pieces by the likes of Cezanne, Gauguin and Degas; as well as a world-renowned collection of Islamic art, plenty of pieces from Africa and, in the (temporarily closed) Pavilion for Japanese Art, all manner of delightful pieces from the Far East.

Details

Address:
5905 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles
90036
Price:
L.A. County Residents: $20, seniors and students $16, 17 and under free; Mon–Fri after 3pm free. Non-residents: $25, seniors and students $21, ages 13–17 $10, 12 and under free. Free every second Tue of the month.
Opening hours:
Mon, Tue, Thu 11am–6 pm; Fri 11 am–8 pm; Sat, Sun 10am–7 pm; closed Wed
Do you own this business?
Sign in & claim business

What’s on

Painting in the River of Angels: Judy Baca and The Great Wall

Judy Baca’s half-mile–long The Great Wall of Los Angeles, a collaborative mural painted in the ’70s along the Tujunga Wash, has received all sorts of museum love in the past few years. But LACMA has a particularly unique show to boast about: The local Chicana muralist and SPARC artists will paint two new sections of The Great Wall during museum hours. The exhibit also debuts a new section of the wall, in honor of activists known as the Freedom Riders, dubbed Generation on Fire.

ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN

  • Painting

This major Ed Ruscha retrospective includes his meticulous photos of L.A. streets and a reconstruction of his Chocolate Room (which, yes, is a room made out sheets upon sheets of chocolate).

Advertising
You may also like
You may also like