LACMA is hosting a free block party and art parade to celebrate its new galleries

You might not have even realized it, but Los Angeles is kind of a parade city. Whether of the Rose, Pride, Golden Dragon or Hollywood Christmas variety, there’s a major procession somewhere across the county almost every month. The latest entry: the Art Parade.

To celebrate the debut of the David Geffen Galleries, the soon-to-open single-building replacement for LACMA’s eastern campus, the Miracle Mile museum will host a block party—with free museum admission—on June 20, as well as a parade of mobile art installations and performances to cap off the day.

LACMA’s new galleries will first welcome members and donors for previews starting April 19, and then the general public can step inside from May 4 onward. So the Very LACMA Block Party will mark the first free public event at the new 110,000-square-foot space (museum admission otherwise normally costs $30, or $25 for L.A. County residents—who can also visit for free after 3pm on weekdays). It’s kind of a supersized edition of the monthly Third Weekends at LACMA: The block party, which runs on Saturday, June 20 from 10am to 7pm, includes free admission to the entire museum (both the new David Geffen Galleries and the existing spaces, which will have just debuted “Fashioning Chinese Women: Empire to Modernity”), guided gallery tours, art activities for kids, DJ sets, food and some overlap with the weekly Latin Sounds concert series.

Most notably, it’ll culminate in the Art Parade from 6 to 7pm. A collaboration with Hollywood gallery Jeffrey Deitch, the parade is actually a revival of a tradition that ran in New York’s SoHo from 2005 to 2008, when more than 1,000 participants took to the streets. Similarly, this L.A. edition is looking for artists, musicians, performers, art students and all sorts of other creatives to submit projects for the parade. Submissions are due by 11:59pm on Sunday, April 5 and may include carryable sculptures, costumes, group banners, inflatables and all sorts of performances (all human-powered, and all appropriate for an all-ages audience).

The museum tells us that the complete schedule and ticketing information for the Very LACMA Block Party will be announced soon—which to us sounds like you’ll need to reserve a ticket, but we’ll make sure to share more info once it’s available. At the very least, you can rest easy that you won’t have to worry about parking: Metro’s D Line extension will open just across the street from the museum only a few weeks before the event.