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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 vicinity of Los Angeles. The museum is adjacent to the George C. Page Museum and La Brea Tar Pits.
LACMA 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. In addition to art exhibits, the museum features film and concert series throughout the year.
Collections
LACMA's more than 250,000 objects are divided among its numerous departments by region, media, and time period.
- African Art
- Art of the Ancient Americas
- Art of the United States
- Arts of the Middle East (including Islamic Art)
- Chinese and Korean Art
- Contemporary Art
- Costume and Textiles
- Decorative Arts and Design
- Egyptian Art
- European Painting and Sculpture
- The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies
- Japanese Art
- Latin American Art
- Modern Art
- Photography
- Prints and Drawings
- South and Southeast Asian 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. |
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History
The parent institution of LACMA was the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art, founded in 1913 in the Exposition Park area near the University of Southern California; the art department of that museum was moved to a new, independent, art-focused institution, LACMA, which opened on Wilshire Boulevard in 1965. The original LACMA complex was composed of three buildings: the Ahmanson Building, the Bing Center, and the Hammer Building, all designed by architect William Pereira. At the time, LACMA was the largest new museum to be built in the United States after the National Gallery of Art.
To house its growing collections of modern and contemporary art, and to provide more space for exhibitions, the museum hired the architectural firm of Hardy, Holzman, Pfeiffer Associates to design its Robert O. Anderson Building, which opened in 1986. This building was renamed the Art of the Americas Building in 2007.
The museum's Pavilion for Japanese Art, designed by maverick architect Bruce Goff, opened in 1988, as did the B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Garden of Rodin bronzes. In 1994, LACMA purchased the adjacent May Department Stores building, an impressive example of streamline moderne architecture designed by Albert C. Martin Sr.; this acquisition increased LACMA's size by 30 percent when the building, now known as LACMA West, opened in 1998.
Local sculptor Robert Graham created the towering, bronze Retrospective Column (1981, cast in 1986) for the entrance of the museum's Anderson Building.
Renovations
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 three phases. Phase I started in 2004 and is scheduled to be completed by February 2008. Phase III is scheduled to be completed toward the end of 2010.
On March 6, 2007, BP announced a $25 million donation to name the entry pavilion under construction as part of LACMA's renovation campaign the "BP Grand Entrance." Solar panels atop the pavilion attempt to cast BP as an environmental innovator. The $25 million gift matches Walt Disney Co.'s 1997 gift for Disney Hall as the biggest corporate donation to the arts in Southern California. Previously, in 2006, LACMA had announced that the new entrance would be called the "Lynda and Stewart Resnick Grand Entrance Pavilion," in honor of their $25 million gift.
The glass-encased entry pavilion under construction is a key point in architect Renzo Piano's plan to unify LACMA's sprawling, often confusing layout of buildings. The BP Grand Entrance and the adjacent Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) comprise the $191 million (originally $150 million) first phase of the three-part expansion and renovation campaign. BCAM is named for Eli & Edythe Broad, who gave $60 million to LACMA's campaign; Mr. Broad also serves on LACMA's Board of Directors.
An earlier plan for LACMA's transformation by architect Rem Koolhaas proposed razing all the current buildings and constructing an entirely new museum. Phase I of the Renzo Piano renovations required demolishing the parking structure on Ogden Avenue and with it LACMA-commissioned graffiti art by street artists Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee.
On February 2, 2007, LACMA's director, Michael Govan, with artist Jeff Koons, revealed plans for a massive 161-foot-tall sculpture featuring an operational 1940s locomotive suspended from a crane. The sculpture would be located at a redesigned entrance on Wilshire Boulevard, between the Ahmanson Building and the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum.
From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacma
Text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
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