The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Opens the David Geffen Galleries

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) officially inaugurates the David Geffen Galleries. The project, born from a long-term public-private partnership between the museum and Los Angeles County, is the result of a collaboration between renowned Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, museum director Michael Govan and the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). The commitment to constructing the new galleries for LACMA’s permanent collection inspired some of the most significant financial and artistic donations in the museum’s history, contributed by a broad community of supporters.

Reinventing the Museum Experience

Zumthor’s design for the David Geffen Galleries is a glass- and concrete-clad structure approximately 275 meters long, winding in soft, sinuous lines through Hancock Park and crossing Wilshire Boulevard.

The distinctive feature of the project lies in its spatial organization. The elevated exhibition level offers sweeping views of the city while simultaneously creating open plazas and new public spaces beneath it. Its configuration makes it possible to display all artworks on a single floor, allowing curators to establish original connections beyond traditional classifications and giving visitors the freedom to explore guided more by curiosity than by a predetermined route.

The study of natural light also plays a key role in the design. The perimeter galleries, open to the city through expansive floor-to-ceiling glass surfaces, coexist with more intimate and contemplative spaces in a delicate balance between light and shadow, transparency and introspection. Subtle atmospheric changes - depending on the time of day, season, and weather - continuously transform the perception of both the artworks and the space itself. Even the custom-designed textile curtains created by Japanese designer Reiko Sudō contribute to this sensory narrative: chromatic and transparent fabrics filter natural light, adding further depth to the architecture while protecting light-sensitive works of art.

An Exhibition Design That Traverses Global Cultures and Artistic Traditions

The inaugural installation of the David Geffen Galleries is the result of a collaborative effort involving forty-five curators from a wide range of academic and disciplinary backgrounds. The restrained material palette that defines the interiors highlights the artworks in the collection, which occupy more than 10,000 square meters of exhibition space. The exhibition unfolds as a narrative sequence spanning the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean Sea, exploring the connections between different cultures, artistic traditions, and geographical regions.

The galleries dedicated to the Atlantic Ocean bring together African and African American textiles, Latin American paintings, sculptures, and furnishings, works from LACMA’s extensive twentieth-century photography collection, as well as examples of American decorative arts and design. Those devoted to the Pacific Ocean instead examine the region’s cultural exchanges, shaped by Indigenous voyages, imperial expansion, and global trade routes.

The sections dedicated to the Indian Ocean - one of the oldest maritime networks in human history and home to some of the world’s earliest port cities - span the full chronological breadth of the collection. Meanwhile, the Mediterranean galleries reflect on the region’s deep cultural interconnections through paintings, drawings, sculptures, and decorative arts from the Islamic and European worlds, works originating from territories once governed by Spain, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquities, and Baroque masterpieces.

To mark the opening of the new galleries, Los Angeles County Museum of Art also commissioned four major site-specific works: Octavia’s Gaze (2025) by Todd Gray, Jagyeong Hall, Gyeongbok Palace (2026) by Do Ho Suh, Fulani (A Map of the Crown) (2024) by Tavares Strachan, and Threading the Boundless: Omnidirectional Terrain (2025) by Sarah Rosalena - an eight-meter-long handwoven tapestry created from distorted satellite imagery of Mars and Earth.

Public Plaza, Pavilions, and Urban Art: LACMA Opens to the City

The exhibition level of the David Geffen Galleries is supported by seven pavilions housing educational and public spaces, a theater, shops, and restaurants. The areas between and around the pavilions, shaded by the elevated main structure above, provide open spaces intended for public art, including the East West Bank Commons and the W.M. Keck Plaza on the north side of Wilshire Boulevard. The entire plaza is itself a commissioned artwork by artist Mariana Castillo Deball titled Feathered Changes. The visual artist’s hand-drawn motifs animate the open-air plaza through richly textured surfaces featuring vibrant animal prints and flowing, sinuous lines.

Within this open and permeable environment, LACMA’s collection - comprising more than 155,000 works spanning over six thousand years of history - can be reinterpreted through unexpected connections and cross-disciplinary narratives. The architecture thus becomes a device capable of suggesting relationships, contaminations, and new cultural short circuits.

>>> Discover the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, a center for artistic research and production in the Arab world designed by Lina Ghotmeh Architecture