5 Things to Know About LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), located in Los Angeles, welcomes nearly a million visitors each year. LACMA recently opened its new David Geffen Galleries, completing a six-year renovation that transformed part of the museum’s campus. Designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, the David Geffen Galleries took approximately 20 years from conception to completion and cost an estimated $724 million. The building features a gallery that spans more than 100,000 square feet. Part of the museum even sits like a bridge over famed Wilshire Boulevard.

The curators behind the David Geffen Galleries don’t just rethink how people move through a museum, they also reconsider what belongs inside one. Situated among more traditional paintings is a 1963 Studebaker Avanti, displayed in a gallery celebrating California’s rich car culture. By placing this classic automobile alongside traditional artworks, LACMA curators encourage visitors to see industrial design, craftmanship, and everyday objects as forms of artistic expression.

LACMA features artworks from some of the biggest names in art, including David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein. In Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio (1980), above, Hockney depicts Los Angeles with winding roads and bright colors, capturing the city’s unique landscapes. Lichtenstein uses bold outlines and colors to transform a comic book panel into fine art in his 1963 Cold Shoulder, below. These two paintings are a small sample of LACMA’s vast collection, which includes more than 155,000 objects spanning thousands of years of art history.

In most museums, curators organize artworks so visitors follow a specific path—for example, chronologically or geographically. According to LACMA, the new galleries are “designed to encourage wandering.” All 26 rooms are on a single floor, with multiple paths in and out. Works from different time periods, cultures, and mediums sit alongside one another. Observing a 20th-century photograph next to a 17th-century Dutch painting, for example, allows visitors to make fresh connections across time and place.

To celebrate the long-awaited opening of the Geffen Galleries, LACMA hosted a star-studded fundraising gala, welcoming more than 800 famous guests from fashion, film, music, sports, and the arts. The gala, which was a significant cultural event itself, raised nearly $11.5 million in donations for LACMA, demonstrating just how beloved and vital the museum is to communities in Los Angeles as well as to visitors from around the world.