Why Bing Theatre matters.
Bing Theatre was a consequential museum auditorium where Miracle Mile's growing arts corridor met Los Angeles County Museum of Art's film programming, live music and the multidisciplinary ambitions of its original Wilshire Boulevard campus.
Set within the former Leo S. Bing Center near Wilshire Boulevard and just steps from Hancock Park, the 600-seat auditorium occupied the southern component of William L. Pereira's three-building museum complex. The theater formed part of a larger education center containing a library and instructional spaces, giving performance and moving-image programs their own architectural home apart from the principal collection galleries. Pereira's modern classicist campus arranged the original pavilions above broad pools and fountains, with landscape architects Thomas Dolliver Church and Robert Herrick Carter shaping the surrounding grounds. The auditorium gave the new museum a purpose-built setting for cinema, artist discussions and music within an institution conceived from its opening as more than a repository for objects. The result was a dedicated cultural chamber embedded within Pereira's original art campus, expanding Los Angeles County Museum of Art's physical program into film, performance and public intellectual life.
What defines Bing Theatre.
Bing Theatre is best known for serving as Los Angeles County Museum of Art's original 600-seat auditorium from the museum's 1965 arrival on Wilshire Boulevard until the building campaign that removed the Pereira-era complex in 2020. Los Angeles County Museum of Art had separated from the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art in 1961, giving the art collection an independent institution four years before the new campus opened. Pereira's firm received the architectural commission in March 1960 and developed three principal pavilions: the Ahmanson Gallery of Art for the permanent collection, the Lytton Gallery for temporary exhibitions and the Leo S. Bing Center containing the theater, library and education facilities. The museum opened the complex in March 1965 during a civic celebration accompanied by fireworks, establishing a major purpose-built art institution along Wilshire Boulevard. French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez inaugurated the theater musically with the world premiere of Éclat, a composition for fifteen instruments whose instrumental combinations and sustained sonorities aligned the new auditorium with experimental postwar music from its first season. Film screenings, classical concerts and artist talks subsequently became recurring components of the theater's program, placing cinema and performance alongside Los Angeles County Museum of Art's gallery exhibitions for more than five decades. The auditorium belonged to Los Angeles County Museum of Art's institutional conception from the beginning, carrying public programs into a dedicated venue at the same moment the museum established its independent Wilshire campus.
A later campus expansion gradually surrounded the Bing Theatre with architecture from different generations. The Anderson Building arrived in 1986 for modern and contemporary art, followed by Bruce Goff's Pavilion for Japanese Art in 1988 and Los Angeles County Museum of Art's 1994 acquisition of the former May Company department store at Wilshire and Fairfax. Renzo Piano subsequently added the Broad Contemporary Art Museum in 2008 and the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion in 2010, extending the museum westward through another major architectural campaign. Los Angeles County Museum of Art eventually committed to replacing four older structures as part of its new permanent-collection project, placing the Bing Center alongside the Ahmanson, Hammer and Art of the Americas buildings within the demolition program. Physical removal began during the museum's pandemic closure in 2020, with Los Angeles County Museum of Art announcing continued work on the Bing Center slab by May. The Leo S. Bing Center was completely gone by August 2020 as work advanced across the remaining structures. Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened the David Geffen Galleries in 2026, closing the long architectural transition from the Pereira campus toward a new permanent-collection building. Bing Theatre survives as a historical component of Los Angeles County Museum of Art rather than an operating auditorium, its 55-year life spanning the museum's establishment on Wilshire through the comprehensive reconstruction of the campus.
How Bing Theatre fits.
Bing Theatre works as the anchor for a Miracle Mile outing connecting active paleontological excavation, Los Angeles automotive culture and a major institution devoted to motion-picture history.
Begin at La Brea Tar Pits, where scientific investigation since 1913 has produced millions of specimens from the last 50,000 years, including saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, mastodons, plants, rodents and insects. Pit 91 returned to active excavation in 1969 under the Rancho La Brea Project, applying intensive sampling methods to a deposit first explored in 1915. Philanthropist George C. Page later financed an onsite museum for fossils that had previously been housed miles away; Frank Thornton and Willis Fagan designed the building, which opened in 1977 with grass-covered sloping walls and Manuel Paz's four-sided Ice Age frieze. Excavation for its foundation uncovered another fossil deposit in 1975, yielding 20 salvaged blocks containing exceptionally concentrated associated specimens. Continue to Petersen Automotive Museum, founded on June 11, 1994 by magazine publisher Robert E. Petersen and Margie Petersen to examine the automobile's influence on American history and culture. The institution occupies a 1962 department store originally designed by Welton Becket, connecting its automotive collection with a building from the period when Los Angeles retail and car culture were reshaping Wilshire Boulevard. A $90 million renovation completed in 2015 gave the exterior a radically new Kohn Pedersen Fox facade and reorganized the interior around rotating exhibitions, with more than 150 vehicles displayed across the museum. Conclude at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which transformed the former May Company building into a major institution devoted to cinema. Renzo Piano Building Workshop restored the 250,000-square-foot department store as the Saban Building and connected it by glass bridges to a new 45,000-square-foot glass-and-concrete sphere. The sphere contains the 945-seat David Geffen Theater, equipped for nitrate, 35mm, 70mm and 4K digital projection as well as Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, giving the district a technically ambitious film auditorium after the disappearance of the Bing. The progression moves from La Brea's deep environmental history through the Petersen's examination of the machine that reshaped Los Angeles and culminates in Renzo Piano's institution for cinema, joining three forms of collecting and interpretation along the Miracle Mile.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Enjoy editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
Foresyte may earn a commission when you book.
