Why Levitated Mass matters.
Levitated Mass is a colossal land-art sculpture where Miracle Mile's museum corridor meets Michael Heizer's dramatic manipulation of weight, void and geological scale through a granite megalith suspended above a descending passage.
Set on Los Angeles County Museum of Art's campus near Wilshire Boulevard and just steps from the Resnick Exhibition Pavilion, the sculpture occupies an elongated outdoor site that isolates a massive natural stone above a precisely constructed incision through the surrounding ground. The 340-ton granite boulder measures 21.5 feet high and wide, resting above a concrete slot whose walls narrow the visual field as the path sinks beneath the stone. The 456-foot passage descends gradually to a maximum depth of 15 feet, carrying pedestrians below the boulder before rising toward open ground at the opposite end. A 15-foot interior width gives the central passage enough breadth for movement beneath the stone without diminishing the extraordinary contrast between the human body and the mass overhead. The result is an immense sculptural composition whose descending path, sheer concrete walls and suspended granite convert Heizer's manipulation of earth and stone into a direct confrontation with mass, scale and gravity.
What defines Levitated Mass.
Levitated Mass is best known for realizing in 2012 a Michael Heizer sculpture first conceived in 1969, closing a 43-year interval between the original proposal and its permanent construction at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Heizer's first attempt involved a 120-ton rock obtained in the Sierra Nevada above Reno and a slot excavated in a northern Nevada dry lakebed. One of two cranes buckled when crews attempted to load the stone, leaving the excavated void and megalith permanently separated and ending the first realization effort. A drawing from the original conception subsequently entered the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin collection, preserving the early form of an artwork Heizer continued to pursue decades later. His broader practice had already placed excavated earth at the center of late-1960s Land Art: Double Negative of 1969 removed 240,000 tons of sandstone and rhyolite from opposing edges of Mormon Mesa, and Virginia Dwan supported that project during her patronage of major earthworks by Heizer, Robert Smithson and other artists. Heizer's family history supplied another consequential connection to immense stone: his father, archaeologist Robert Heizer, studied the deserts of the American West and the Olmec culture at La Venta, including colossal stone monuments, and his grandfather Olaf Heizer was a geologist. Work at the Pyrite-Hubbs Quarry in Riverside County finally changed the sculpture's fate in 2007, when a granite megalith dislodged from the quarry wall during a detonation. Heizer recognized the 340-ton stone as suitable for the unfinished work, and discussions with Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan led to the decision to construct the sculpture on the museum campus.
Moving that stone from Jurupa Valley to Los Angeles became a separate engineering undertaking whose scale drew communities across Southern California into the project. Emmert International devised a specially designated route after extensive engineering analysis with public agencies across four counties and 22 cities, avoiding infrastructure unable to carry the combined load. The transporter departed on February 28, 2012 and moved only at night, traveling near seven miles per hour across a route totaling 105 miles before reaching Los Angeles County Museum of Art on March 10. Hanjin Shipping financed the transportation, joining private supporters including Jane and Terry Semel, Bobby Kotick, Carole Bayer Sager and Bob Daly, Beth and Joshua Friedman, Steve Tisch Family Foundation, Elaine Wynn, Richard Merkin and the Mohn Family Foundation in supporting the acquisition. Los Angeles County Museum of Art dedicated the completed work to Nancy Daly, the museum's former board chair and an advocate for children and the arts. The public opening followed on June 24, 2012, completing a project whose first construction attempt predated Los Angeles County Museum of Art's finished version by more than four decades. The sculpture joined a career extending from Heizer's early excavations through City, his vast Nevada project begun in 1970, placing the Los Angeles work within a sustained artistic investigation of immense physical scale, geological form and human intervention in terrain.
How Levitated Mass fits.
Levitated Mass works as the anchor for a Miracle Mile outing connecting Chris Burden's reconstruction of Los Angeles street infrastructure, the architectural preservation of Hollywood history and the automobile culture that reshaped Southern California.
Begin at Urban Light, Chris Burden's 2008 installation assembled from 202 restored cast-iron streetlamps that formerly illuminated communities across Southern California. Burden acquired his first examples after encountering disassembled lamps at the Rose Bowl Flea Market, eventually accumulating a collection spanning 17 designs and painting the poles a uniform gray to emphasize differences in their cast-iron ornament. Los Angeles County Museum of Art installed the work at its Wilshire Boulevard entrance in February 2008 through support from the Gordon Family Foundation; a 2018 project backed by the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation replaced 309 incandescent bulbs with LEDs, cutting power consumption by 90 percent. Continue to Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, where Renzo Piano Building Workshop joined the restored 1939 May Company department store with a new glass-and-concrete sphere. The former department store, now the Saban Building, contains 250,000 square feet across six renovated floors, and glass bridges connect it with a 45,000-square-foot spherical building containing the David Geffen Theater and Dolby Family Terrace. Albert C. Martin and Samuel A. Marx designed the original Streamline Moderne department store, whose cylindrical corner volume sheathed in gold-colored mosaic became a major architectural feature of the Wilshire and Fairfax intersection. Conclude at Petersen Automotive Museum, founded by magazine publisher Robert E. Petersen and Margie Petersen on June 11, 1994 to examine the automobile's history and cultural influence. The institution occupies a 1962 department-store building originally designed by Welton Becket, giving the museum a physical connection to the postwar commercial architecture created during Los Angeles's automobile-centered expansion. A $90 million renovation completed in 2015 brought a Kohn Pedersen Fox exterior composed of sweeping stainless-steel ribbons over the existing structure and reworked the interior for 25 rotating exhibitions with more than 150 vehicles on display. The progression moves from Burden's transformation of historic municipal streetlights through Piano's union of preserved Streamline Moderne architecture and contemporary cinema culture and culminates in Kohn Pedersen Fox's dramatic reconstruction of a postwar department store for an institution devoted to the machine that fundamentally altered Los Angeles.
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