You step up onto a floating floor that towers above Los Angeles streets and meander in between the nooks and open spaces inside the building. You find a contemporary chair design next to an impressionist landscape from the 1880s, complemented by a stone engraving of hieroglyphs from 1400 BCE ancient Egypt. Every artwork and space seems to flow into one another, forgetting about the divisions based on time, place or genre.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) embarked on a pursuit of redefining what it means to go to a museum inside its new David Geffen Galleries.
Does it mark a revolution in how art is displayed, or are the changes a bold experiment that does not fully reach the original goals?
The idea behind the new opening was to reflect the rich diversity of L.A., and thus foster connections between cultures without establishing any hierarchies, encouraging non-linear discovery of art.
These core principles resulted in a truly innovative creation. The building itself is the first of them.
Perhaps the most unique part of the museum is the structure that hosts the artworks. Designed by Peter Zumthor, the Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architect, the concrete construction with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking L.A. streets is the largest piece of art in the museum. A six-year, almost $724 million pursuit resulted in an unusual, modernist and certainly impressive creation. The interior is extremely light and has a raw appearance, as almost every surface is made out of pure concrete. The interplay of soft light and solid form is a breathtaking, almost surreal composition. Most importantly, the minimalist space is calm, almost vacant.
This gives full spotlight to the art pieces inside, which are what makes the museum come alive. With so much depth and diversity in the presented art, choosing a very quiet, but stable building design helps to concentrate, keep a proper balance and serves as an anchor for the works.
David Geffen Galleries are a structure that quite literally needs art to become a complete object.
One of the main goals of Michael Govan, the CEO and Wallis Annenberg director of LACMA, was to have no hierarchy. LACMA took it to another level and, on top of positioning everything on one plane, they made the 26 galleries open and intertwined with each other. The viewers flow between the pieces of art and get “surprised” by world-famous paintings of Van Gogh, René Magritte or Henri Matisse. Every single artwork gets equal attention, disrupting the traditional preferential treatment of European or more famous artists.
The result is an unforgettable collection where every individual piece shines, and it’s not only thanks to the Californian sun seeping in. From the 2,000-year-old “Dog” figurine from Mexico to the installation “Jagyeong Hall, Gyeongbok Palace” (2026) by Do Ho Suh made specifically for the museum, it is a selection where discovery is at the forefront of the viewing experience.
The same idea of interacting and being integrated with the county is applied to the way it engages with the viewers. With no set path to take and no distinct beginning or end of the exhibition, the person watching becomes an active participant, forming their own connections, as opposed to staying a passive recipient of the museum’s pieces. The structure of the building is in a conversation with the artworks, but the power to narrate that communication is given to the spectators.
Having such an immersive experience, while hyper-personal, is not always easy to grasp. It requires a noticeable amount of conceptual work from the attendee. And that work does not start when one arrives inside the impressive building. Reading about the layout, the idea behind how it is divided, what places are connected and how, is extremely beneficial, to not say necessary, to avoid becoming lost in between a rotating selection from 155,000 LACMA’s permanent collection pieces. For people less familiar with the museum, the David Geffen Galleries pose a risk of being confusing and overwhelming.
Segmentation of the galleries into four main sections responding to four main bodies of water, the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, can be especially challenging to understand. It is hard to know when you have transitioned into another ‘ocean,’ which limits the comprehension and appreciation of the regions it encompasses. Not only is the idea behind the core parts unclear, but the execution sometimes loses the connection to them, with some galleries being centered around concepts such as “In This Light,” which speaks to the architecture of the building, but does not necessarily fit into any of the four oceans sections. Leaving the traditional divisions of time, genre, and place came at a cost of vagueness at LACMA’s new addition.
Thankfully, the smallest sections of the building, the 26 individual galleries it is composed of, make up for the bit of chaos that happens in the central division. Every gallery is still well integrated with others, with most being put in an open space entirely, while the more sensitive works have their own, darker rooms. Here, the pieces contribute to the specific idea that is being explored, covering a myriad of themes such as “Images of the Divine in South Asia” or “Keepers of the Mesoamerican Cosmos” in a clear, cohesive manner.
The thematic galleries are where the museum’s main concepts of innovation and equality in art are displayed to their fullest extent. The way in which they are constructed is a truly masterful way of visual storytelling that one would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.
In these spaces, a culture (or a chosen aspect of it) is showcased through a multiperspectival lens, intertwining genres, time and subjects. The viewer flows between depictions of nature, portraits of locals, abstract works full of cultural symbolism, and everyday objects that seem disconnected but are brought together by the roots and history of the societies they talk about. The parts that I believe executed it particularly well were “Picturing the American West,” “Polynesia: Our Sea of Islands” and “Labour and Leisure in the American Metropolis.”
The David Geffen Galleries managed to embed meanings that not only show a particular culture but also shape a wholly immersive narration around it. On top of that, the unusual pairings and juxtaposition of contrasting pieces under one theme, such as depictions of the worker with the aristocratic class in America in the mentioned “Labour and Leisure in the American Metropolis,” facilitate the formation of original insights about a particular society or cultural topic that stay with the viewer for longer.
Is, what may be deemed as a revolutionary approach of LACMA to reshape what the purpose of a museum is, a successful transition?
While these galleries may be harder to traverse than their counterparts, everyone will find an artwork that resonates with them. It is a place for everyone that every person should experience at least once. There is also nothing stopping you from coming back, since every path taken throughout the exhibitions crafts a new and one-of-a-kind artistic journey. LACMA has proven that presenting cultures and their inter-connections, as opposed to putting out a record of a singular place or time period, is possible. And maybe that is how the cultural heritage that art is was supposed to be presented all along. Being as diverse, chaotic and interconnected as the city it was made for.
David Geffen Galleries at LACMA open to the public on May 4th.
