LACMA unveils its biggest expansion: $700 million and 20 years for a ‘museum of cultures’

It took nearly 20 years of work, tons of concrete, $724 million, demolishing buildings, and changing the urban landscape of a city to finally inaugurate the largest and most ambitious cultural project in Los Angeles in recent years: the expansion of LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the leading art museum in the western United States and home to the largest collection this side of the Mississippi. An immense concrete structure, a Herculean amoeba, now snakes through the heart of the United States’ second-largest city to house part of the vast permanent collection, previously stored in warehouses, which will now be enjoyed by its million annual visitors, and likely many more.

The opening of this expansion, the David Geffen Galleries — named after the music, film, and theater producer, co-founder of DreamWorks, a major patron of the city, and a donor of $150 million to the project — is the city’s major cultural event this year and finally takes place on Sunday, April 19, after a long crusade by its director, Michael Govan, to bring it to fruition over the past 20 years. He personally selected (not without criticism) the architect for the project, the Swiss Pritzker Prize winner Peter Zumthor, who had never before built anything of this scale.

But now, the building is not just part of the museum, but perhaps its main attraction. Located on Wilshire Boulevard, a major thoroughfare in the city, it is perfectly flanked by La Brea Park, which showcases the geological origins of the settlement, and by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, its economic, social, and cultural heart. Now, the new LACMA and its 32,000 square meters will share space with them.

At the press presentation on Wednesday, a packed event held in the shadow of the massive concrete structure, Govan appeared excited and talkative. He knows that what he has achieved is a milestone in the city’s artistic history. Not only for its content — it will house nearly 3,000 works of art — but also for its form. Zumthor’s building engages with the city and is designed for and by it: it is capable of moving up to 1.5 meters, in case of an earthquake (or, rather, for when one occurs).

In a place lacking public spaces and recreational areas, the new LACMA completes that museum and landscaped mile, where Angelenos often picnic, play with their children, or listen to live jazz. The brand-new Galleries will be part of it, with their sculptures by Alexander Calder, Ai Weiwei, and Jeff Koons (made with native Californian plants); with their Rodin on the lawn; with their free educational center for children and families; their cafeteria (sponsored by Erewhon, one of the most expensive supermarkets in the county); and with the concept that the building, with two very long staircases leading to the open gallery on the upper floor, has no front door or back: no one will ever have their back to it.

“The idea was to create a museum without hierarchies, with the transparency to allow visitors to see Los Angeles,” explained Govan, who began developing the project in 2007. While the immense gallery is made of concrete at its base, its upper section is transparent, glazed, although in certain areas it is covered by grayish polyester curtains. These curtains are not only aesthetically unappealing, but while they protect some of the artworks, they obscure the view of palm trees and light, so quintessentially Californian. Govan stated that part of the plan was precisely that: “A space to wander above the park, among the trees.”

Zumthor undertook the project in collaboration with the prestigious Chicago firm SOM (Skidmore, Owens and Merrill), a nearly six-year undertaking that involved demolishing other buildings in the area, not without controversy. Finishing touches are still being applied. Furthermore, the neighboring La Brea Park will soon close for renovations in preparation for the 2028 Olympic Games. The Galleries, though they may still appear under construction due to the concrete walls displaying works ranging from Rubens to Matisse, Persian rugs to French abbey arches, are now complete. The artworks are interwoven and brought together in a space with few walls, arranged thematically, or as it used to be called, in an “encyclopedic museum.” The intention: to encourage thought, dialogue, and questioning.

“The term ‘encyclopedic museum’ is specific to North America. There are no encyclopedic museums in Spain, nor in Mexico, not even the British Museum, with art from so many regions,” Diana Magaloni, deputy director of LACMA and head of conservation, explained to this newspaper. The Mexican, former director of the National Museum of Anthropology, recounts that “encyclopedic museums are born with the ambition of containing the world’s knowledge, housing the world’s collections for a North American public, who don’t live in Europe, and being able to view the world from here with the ambition of educating.” Therefore, this museum is a mix of everything: ancient Greek art almost touching contemporary African art; 21st-century Kyoto vases alongside Dutch paintings from more than 800 years ago, large-format photographs, and Egyptian mummies from the 1st century.

“It’s more of a museum of cultures,” she reflects. “A global museum. And this is, I think, the most multicultural city there is, and the fifth-largest economy in the world,” she points out, referring to California. “And we owe a debt to that city.” For her, the arrival of the David Geffen Galleries, the Zumthor museum, the 3,000 new pieces, and its integration with the city refresh and enhance Los Angeles as a new artistic hub. “This elevates it to a major cultural power. It’s true that many contemporary artists have moved from New York; there’s a lot of new and very, very daring contemporary art.”

As the multicultural urban behemoth that Los Angeles is, with a population that is nearly 50% Latino, there is a strong presence of migrants. Two Mexican artists have created powerful works in the building, in the public plaza that surrounds it. Sculptor Pedro Reyes has brought an enormous volcanic stone head, Tlali, weighing 80 tons, from his workshop in Coyoacán. Meanwhile, Mariana Castillo was responsible for shaping the floor of the entire complex. This artwork, spanning over 19,200 square meters and titled Feathered Changes, was created over two years with more than 100 Mexican workers from Los Angeles. With shapes created using rakes and imprinted with the tracks of native Los Angeles County animals, from coyotes to roadrunners, it can be enjoyed by all who visit LACMA, whether they have paid admission or not.

“At this political moment in which we talk so much about territory, migration, and origins, I think it has even more meaning that I was able to create this piece together with a Swiss architect in a museum in Los Angeles, and with Mexican brothers,” Castillo recounts, during a meeting with EL PAÍS and several patrons of the arts sponsored by the Mexican consul in Los Angeles in honor of both artists, on what she called “a very important day for Mexican culture.”

For Castillo, the work is something personal, the largest of her career, and it speaks of passage, of the importance of what we walk on, of those who come before and after us. “Also of our bodies, of how we leave marks on the places we inhabit. They can be subtle, they can be definitive, but they are there,” she explains to this newspaper, with whom she also reflects on her role as an artist: if for centuries many artists have created murals and tapestries on walls and frescoes on ceilings, she now intervenes on the floor. “Now I say I’m a ‘floor artist,’ or something like that, as a new category,” she laughs. “I’m interested in showing that horizontal surface on which we walk.”

As Deputy Director Magaloni explained regarding the museum, whose collection is composed mostly of private donations, the works, their arrangement, and their approach are very different from more traditional museums, whether European or American, such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “We don’t have a collection comparable to the Prado. We never will,” she acknowledges. “It’s not a national museum, nor an imperialist museum, like the Louvre or the British Museum. We have a collection with many gaps; we don’t have everything. We have two Rembrandts.”

Here, everything comes together and intertwines, sometimes in a conversation that feels natural; at other times, with difficulties in understanding each other, seemingly aiming to unsettle. But, as the curator explains, art also involves not only that old-fashioned notion of an encyclopedia, with entries into knowledge, but also asking questions. “I believe we must trust art for its own sake. Its presence has the power to communicate. The questions are softened by the beauty of the place. It is an experience that inspires awe.”

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