There’s not a single piece of artwork to see on the concrete walls of LACMA’s new building right now. And yet, this is undoubtedly the most exciting art destination in Los Angeles this weekend.
Months ahead of the galleries’ planned April 2026 debut, and before the institution begins installing artwork, LACMA has allowed the public to take a peek inside its new David Geffen Galleries—to the tune of a one-of-a-kind performance from local saxophone extraordinaire Kamasi Washington, no less.
For the museum members and everyday Angelenos who were lucky enough to secure tickets, they’ll find more than 100 musicians split between 10 performance areas, with each ensemble playing a different component of the six-part jazz suite Harmony of Difference; you might catch Washington soloing on sax toward the center of the building, but round a corner and you’ll hear the buzz of a brass section or the echoing voices of a choir.
But what about the building itself? The Peter Zumthor-designed replacement for LACMA’s myriad mid-century buildings on its eastern campus consolidates collections into a single-floor, 110,000-square-foot amoeba-shaped space. It’s also, since its unveiling in 2013 and start of construction in 2020, invited plenty of strong opinions about everything from its aesthetic to its footprint. So what’s it like to actually step inside (still sans art, of course)?
I was invited to the museum on Thursday for the first of three performances. About an hour before sunset, I filed past the familiar spider-like lines of Tony Smith’s Smoke sculpture and hoofed it up the long staircase into the David Geffen Galleries (there are elevators, as well). I passed by what looked like a ground-floor restaurant space and a future bookshop but could only gawk from outside.
Upstairs, though, I was free to roam across the entire floor—and roam I did. The building isn’t broken up into traditional rooms; instead, there are roughly two dozen enclosed galleries toward the center of the structure, while the entirety of the exterior is lined with floor-to-ceiling windows.
The views are absolutely dreamy and offer a fresh vantage point that makes it feel as though you’re floating above one of L.A.’s most crowded cultural corridors. Each curve unveils a new, unexpected perspective: overlooking the lake at the La Brea Tar Pits, eye-level with the bubble-like theater of the Academy Museum and literally on top of the traffic on Wilshire Boulevard.
Yes, the building spans the busy road (Jeff Koons’s floral Split-Rocker sculpture will eventually anchor the outside of the southern side), and it’s tough to articulate just how wild it is to shuffle along the museum floor and suddenly find yourself crossing over the iconic street. At every point, the architecture perfectly frames each vista, so—for better or worse—expect plenty of posing, particularly as the setting sun floods the west side with dramatic lighting.
Despite all of those windows, it was easy to get a little bit turned around inside of the space—but I imagine that’ll be much less of an issue once there’s actually artwork installed. For now, it’s a lot of unadorned concrete, so if you’re not looking out a window, there are no other visual cues to place exactly where you are. Without paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations, the interior galleries feel raw and empty because they’re, well, raw and empty right now—so I’ll hold off any sort of proper judgment until after the installation process has wrapped up. (You can see how the galleries will look with art inside over on LACMA’s site.)
When Washington’s performance wound down, it was dark out. As I descended the staircase out of the David Geffen Galleries, Urban Lights’ rows of streetlamps glowed in the background. On my way in, I thought some angles of the building were more flattering than others; the profile of the tar pits side looks beautiful, but stand close enough to the western tip and it feels a little like a low-angle selfie. But as I was exiting and looked back up the staircase at night, it was as if the entire building was floating. It was oddly peaceful—and already difficult to imagine the museum and Wilshire Boulevard without it.
Check out some more photos below. Kamasi Washington continues his performances on Friday and Saturday—tickets are unfortunately sold out—followed by a series of member previews of the building. The David Geffen Galleries open April 2026.
