Facade of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, from Wilshire Boulevard
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, also known as LACMA, is the official and world-renowned art museum of the County of Los Angeles, California. Located on Wilshire Boulevard along Museum Row in the Miracle Mile neighborhood of Los Angeles, LACMA is the premier visual arts museum in the Western United States and is the largest encyclopedic museum west of Chicago. Its holdings include more than 250,000 works spanning the history of art from ancient times to the present, and in addition to displaying art, the museum puts on several movie series a year ranging from silent classics to modern foreign film.
LACMA was founded in 1910 as part of the Museum of Science, History and Art in the Exposition Park area near the University of Southern California, and became an independent art-focused institution in 1961. The museum moved to its current location in 1965. The Japanese pavilion designed by maverick architect Bruce Goff, and the B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Garden of Rodin bronzes, both opened in 1988. The museum is adjacent to the George C. Page Museum and La Brea Tar Pits.
In 1994, LACMA purchased the adjacent May Department Stores building, increasing its size by 30 percent, now known as LACMA West, open since 1998.
Local sculptor Robert Graham created the towering Restrospective Column in 1981 as a welcoming artwork at the entrance of the museum.
In 2004, LACMA’s Board of Trustees unanimously approved plans to transform the museum, led by world-renowned architect Renzo Piano. The transformation consists of 3 phases. Phase I started in 2004 and is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2007. Phase III is scheduled to be completed toward the end of 2010.
Collections
LACMA's more than 250,000 objects are divided among ten departments in specific art-historical fields:
- American Art
- Ancient and Islamic Art
- Costumes and Textiles
- Decorative Arts
- European Painting and Sculpture
- Far Eastern Art
- Indian and Southeast Asian Art
- Photography
- Prints and Drawings
- Twentieth-Century Art
LACMA boasts one of the largest collections of Latin American Art due to the generous donation of more than 2,000 works of art by Bernard Lewin and his wife Edith Lewin in 1996.
