LACMA's David Geffen Galleries are finally open!

Hello El Lay!

I’m culture writer Carolina A. Miranda and it’s LACMA week in LA, with the museum’s new David Geffen Galleries opening to members this past Sunday. KCRW’s Frances Anderton got into the basics of the new building in the most recent edition of her Design and Architecture newsletter, and I discussed my first impressions with Madeleine Brand on Press Play.

Before I get into the nitty-gritty, I wanted to note that one of the stars of the new wing is an installation by LA artist Todd Gray. Octavia’s Gaze (2025), as his piece is titled, is a three-dimensional photo sculpture (think: layers of framed images resting atop one another) that explores the migratory paths taken by enslaved Africans to the West. On one end rests a photograph of the famed science fiction author and LA native Octavia Butler, whose work examined these fraught histories.

Gray is currently the subject of a solo show at Perrotin gallery in Mid-City, where a study for Octavia’s Gaze is currently on view. Also on view are various new works that explore the idea of the portal — ones that connect West African landscapes to formal gardens and historic strucures in Europe and the United States. I was taken by an affecting 2026 piece titled Paradox of Liberty (Monticello, Elmina, Akwidaa), which visually links Thomas Jefferson's famous Virginia estate to sites in Ghana that were connected to the translatlantic slave trade.

Portals, as the show is titled, is on view through May 30th. Find the details here.

Now, onto the new building, with forays into…

Kennedy Center drama
Layoffs at Artnet
Monet on cannabis

More below…

At top: Octavia's Gaze (Study #1, LACMA), 2026, by Todd Gray, at Perrotin. (Paul Salveson / Perrotin)

LACMA IN 4 EASY STEPS

Scherezade García, Harvest of the Sea (2023), on view at LACMA's new Geffen Galleries. (Carolina A. Miranda)

LACMA’s new Geffen Galleries — designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor — have finally landed. And so have rthe eviews, which are touching down with the force of a meteor shower. See: Artnet, The Guardian, ARTnews, Hyperallergic, Christopher Hawthorne's Punch List, and William Poundstone’s aptly named Los Angeles County Museum on Fire. I’ll have my own simmering take in the days to come in Bloomberg Citylab. Don’t rush me, I’m mulling.

Though, having now visited the galleries on a couple of occasions, I do have some hot tips for attacking the space:

1) Get lost. The building is a blob, paths shoot off in every direction, wayfinding is almost non-existent, and the collection is installed around a loose concept of “oceans” rather than chronology and region — which means you might find a work by a contemporary video artist displayed across from a 19th-century door from Eastern Tibet. Is this disorienting? Definitely. Will you spend valuable time circling back to a gallery you may have already seen because you have no idea where you are? Absolutely. The best bet: take one of the perimeter paths all the way to one of the ends of the building and then zig zag your way back so that you don't spend your entire visit going in circles. You'll still get lost. (Just go with it.) But until we can collectively figure out how to navigate this thing, it’s going to be an experience of “wonder and wander” — to borrow the words of Naima Keith, the museum’s vice president of education and public programs.

A sportscar in a museum gallery is silhouetted against daylight from floor to ceiling galleries.

New to LACMA's collection is a Studebaker Avanti from the 1960s. (Carolina A. Miranda)

2) Wear the comfy walkers. Some folks are making hay of the fact that the Zumthor-designed wing is 10,000 square feet smaller than the buildings it replaced. It’s certainly a little ridic to spend $724 million to build something that is smaller than what it replaced. But I’m also of the mind that what’s done is done. (The time to fret over this would have been in 2019.) Moreover, the new wing is ginormous: containing 110,000 square feet of gallery space, which comes to roughly the area of two football fields. And there is a lot of concrete, which makes tromping around the museum, along with the plaza below it, hard on the body. So my advice is to wear a pair of cozy, soft-soled shoes. This is as much for your comfort as everybody else’s: the acoustics inside the galleries are terrible, so if you rock the hard heels, expect everyone — and I mean everyone — to hear you clickety clack across the room.

A Chinese chaopao (a man's formal court robe) dating to the early 18th century. (Carolina A. Miranda)

3) Linger in one of the standalone galleries. Upon the building’s completion last year, the Geffen Galleries opened for a series of performances led by Kamasi Washington, who helped baptize the space. The performance was inspiring. But the empty building was worrying, with display areas that, bereft of art, looked downright carceral. (I may have cracked a joke about megaprisons on-air.) The good news is that the art, along with pigment tints on some of the walls, has somewhat softened the look of the place. Also, even amid the hustle and bustle of the previews, I have been able to get a gallery to myself on more than one occasion. In fact, I spent a good long while inside the space that houses the famed Ardabil Carpet, a rare Persian carpet from the 16th century. On the walls were leaves from Persianate manuscripts — one of my favorite areas of the collection, which I had sorely missed while the Geffen was under construction. It was surprisingly peaceful, and I felt as if I was reuniting with old friends.

A long, upholstered bench stands before a Japanese folding screen showing stylized waves against a gold background.

LACMA's bench game is strong. This one offers a perfect perch for admiring an early 19th century screen by Yamaato Kakurei. (Carolina A. Miranda)

4) Take a seat. As an elder born in the 1900s, I have a thing for museum seating. In fact, in 2023, I did a comprehensive report card on LA museum benches. (The Getty Center was head of the class, with it's A++ upholstered benches with seat backs.) I am happy to report that the benches at the Geffen Galleries, which were designed by Zumthor’s studio, get a solid A. They are sturdy and comfortable. Though there are far too few of them, especially inside the galleries, where occasionally it'd be nice to linger in front of a painting. Instead, you'll find most of the seating around the perimeter of the building. Many of these do come with terrific views of the surrounding neighborhood. (If there’s one thing the new building gets right, it’s that it does engage the city around it.) So if you’re in need of a rest, park yourself on the bench with views of the mammoth sinking into the Tar Pits, the most interesting sightline from anywhere in the museum. It’s a perfect place to meditate on death and the nature of geological time, not to mention David Geffen’s messy, messy divorce.

🦖🦖🦖

LACMA’s Geffen Galleries are currently open to members through May 3rd and will open to the general public starting May 4th; lacma.org.

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Signing off with this gorgeous essay by Daniela Gutiérrez Flores about reading Don Quixote three pages at a time.

Thanks for sticking with us! And see you next week...