Why you should experience Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, California.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an expansive encyclopedic museum where Miracle Mile's cultural corridor meets global collections, major outdoor sculpture and an architectural campus extending across Wilshire Boulevard.
Set along Wilshire Boulevard near Spaulding Avenue and just steps from Craft Contemporary, the museum occupies a 20-acre campus beside Hancock Park with plazas, gardens and exhibition buildings distributed along one of Central Los Angeles's principal east-west corridors. Smidt Welcome Plaza opens the Wilshire frontage as a broad outdoor cultural space where Chris Burden's Urban Light forms a dense field of restored municipal streetlamps at the campus edge. Burden assembled 202 cast-iron lamps representing 17 designs once used across Los Angeles and neighboring cities, creating a work whose repeated columns shift visually as the viewing angle changes. Alexander Calder's Three Quintains (Hello Girls) supplies a separate sculptural presence through mobile geometric forms driven by water jets, the product of a commission initiated by Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Art Museum Council before the Wilshire campus opened. The result is a museum whose broad grounds, public sculpture, gardens and multiple architectural generations place art directly within the physical fabric of Miracle Mile before the galleries themselves begin.
What you should know about Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art is best known for building the largest art museum in the western United States from institutional roots reaching to the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art, founded in Exposition Park in 1910. The art division became an independent institution in 1961 and opened its Wilshire Boulevard campus in March 1965, marking a major expansion of Los Angeles's cultural infrastructure during the postwar era. William L. Pereira and Associates designed the original complex as three principal pavilions, with the permanent collection housed in the Ahmanson Building, temporary exhibitions in the Hammer Building and public programs centered on the 600-seat Bing Theater. Expansion continued with the Anderson Building in 1986, later renamed the Art of the Americas Building, followed in 1988 by Bruce Goff's Pavilion for Japanese Art. Goff had originally developed the pavilion with collector Joe Price around Price's exceptional Edo-period holdings, treating the artworks as the controlling architectural concern and arranging scrolls and screens for viewing under natural light in individual alcoves. Renzo Piano subsequently reshaped the western campus through the Broad Contemporary Art Museum in 2008 and Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion in 2010, additions that supplied 100,000 square feet of gallery area. Across those successive expansions, Los Angeles County Museum of Art's holdings grew beyond 155,000 objects spanning 6,000 years, encompassing fields extending from Egyptian and ancient Middle Eastern art through Japanese art, photography, costume and textiles, European painting, Latin American art and contemporary work.
Peter Zumthor's David Geffen Galleries opened in April 2026 as the culmination of another two decades of campus redevelopment and gave Los Angeles County Museum of Art a new building dedicated to its permanent collection. David Geffen supplied a $150 million gift toward the undertaking, and Los Angeles County invested $125 million. Zumthor conceived a 900-foot-long horizontal structure that crosses Wilshire Boulevard, replacing four aging eastern-campus buildings and placing the principal exhibition floor above the ground plane. The exhibition level contains 110,000 square feet of galleries arranged on one horizontal plane, removing the vertical hierarchy produced when departments occupy separate floors. The inaugural collection installation reorganized works through the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans and the Mediterranean Sea, creating cross-cultural groupings across periods and geographic traditions. Major construction finished at the end of 2024, building-system commissioning continued into early 2026 and the museum inaugurated the completed galleries with an April 19 ribbon-cutting. Jeff Koons's Split-Rocker, composed of more than 45,000 plants, anchors part of the surrounding ground-level public realm, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art commissioned Todd Gray's Octavia's Gaze for the new building. The Geffen Galleries shifted the museum's permanent collection into a single continuous architectural field spanning Wilshire, creating the latest institutional chapter in a campus that has been repeatedly rebuilt since 1965.
How to fold Los Angeles County Museum of Art into your trip.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art works as the anchor for a Miracle Mile outing connecting Ice Age paleontology, the architecture of motion pictures and Los Angeles's century-long relationship with the automobile.
Begin at La Brea Tar Pits, where asphaltic deposits preserve an immense assemblage of Late Pleistocene plants and animals within Hancock Park. Geologist W. W. Orcutt recognized extinct fossils there in 1901, J. C. Merriam of the University of California examined the locality in 1905 and Los Angeles County excavations between 1913 and 1915 recovered more than 750,000 specimens from 96 sites. George Allan Hancock donated 23 acres to the county in 1924 with provisions protecting the park and its fossils, and philanthropist George C. Page later financed an onsite museum designed by Frank Thornton and Willis Fagan that opened in 1977. Excavation for a nearby underground garage in 2006 exposed 16 previously unknown fossil deposits and a near-complete Columbian mammoth, producing the continuing Project 23 research effort. 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 spherical building devoted to cinema. The former department store, now the Saban Building, contains 250,000 square feet across six renovated floors, and glass bridges connect it to the 45,000-square-foot sphere containing the David Geffen Theater and Dolby Family Terrace. The original Streamline Moderne May Company structure holds City of Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument status, preserving a major Wilshire retail building inside an institution devoted to the art, science and craft of filmmaking. Conclude at Petersen Automotive Museum, founded by magazine publisher Robert E. Petersen and Margie Petersen on June 11, 1994 to examine automobile history and its cultural consequences. The museum occupies a 1962 department store designed by Welton Becket, giving its automotive collection a home within architecture from the period when car-centered development profoundly shaped Los Angeles. A $90 million renovation completed in 2015 transformed the exterior through Kohn Pedersen Fox's sweeping metal ribbons and reorganized the interior into 25 rotating exhibitions with more than 150 vehicles on display. The progression moves from prehistoric animals preserved beneath Hancock Park through Piano's institution for the industry that projected Los Angeles around the world and culminates in Petersen's study of the machine that reshaped the city's geography, connecting deep time, cinema and automobile culture along a compact stretch of Miracle Mile.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Experience premium editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
