It has taken almost 20 years of effort, tons of cement, 724 million dollars, tearing down buildings and changing the urban landscape of a city to finally inaugurate the largest and most ambitious cultural work in Los Angeles in recent years: the expansion of LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the main museum of works of art in the western United States, the largest collection on this side of the Mississippi. An immense mass of cement, a herculean amoeba, is already winding through the heart of the second largest city in the country, to house part of the immense permanent collection, previously kept in warehouses, which will now be enjoyed by its million annual visitors, probably multiplied.
The opening of this expansion, under the name of David Geffen Galleries – the music, film and theater producer, co-creator of DreamWorks, great patron of the city and who has donated 150 million to the project – is the city’s great cultural event this year and finally takes place on Sunday, April 19, after a great crusade by its director, Michael Govan, to carry it out over the last 20 years. He personally (and not without criticism) chose the architect of the work, the Swiss Peter Zumthor, winner of the Pritzker Prize, who had never built anything of such magnitude.
But now, the building is not only part of the museum, but perhaps its main attraction for visiting. Located on Wilshire Boulevard, the city’s artery, it is perfectly flanked by La Brea Park, which shows the geological origins of the settlement, and by the Film Academy Museum, which is its economic, social and cultural heart. Now, the new LACMA and its 32,000 square meters will share space with them.
At the press presentation on Wednesday, in a crowded event under the shadow of the cement mass, Govan seemed excited and talkative. He knows that what he has achieved is a milestone in the city’s artistic history. Not only for the content, where almost 3,000 works of art can be seen, but for the continent. Zumthor’s building – winner of the Pritzker in 2009 – dialogues with the city and is designed by and for it: it is capable of move up to one and a half meters, in case there is an earthquake (or, rather, for when there is one).
In a place lacking public and recreational spaces, the new LACMA completes that museum and garden mile, where Angelenos often have picnics, play with their children or listen to live jazz. The brand new Galleries will be part of it, with its sculptures by Alexander Calder, Ai Weiwei and Jeff Koons (made with native Californian plants); with his Rodin on the grass; with its free educational center for children and families; its cafe (sponsored by Erewhon, one of the most expensive supermarkets in the county); with the concept that the building, with two very long stairs that lead to the open gallery on the upper floor, has no front door or back door: no one will ever be behind you.
“The idea was to make a museum without hierarchies, with the transparency of being able to see Los Angeles,” explained Govan, who began launching the project in 2007. If the immense gallery is made of cement at its base, in its upper part it is transparent, glassed, although in certain areas covered by grayish polyester curtains, not only unaesthetic, but, although they protect certain works, they cloud that vision of palm trees and light, so Californian. Govan stated that part of the plan was that, “space to roam over the park, among the forest.”
Zumthor has carried out the project together with the prestigious Chicago studio SOM (Skidmore, Owens and Merrill) in a work lasting almost six years for which other buildings in the area have been eliminated, not without controversy. The auctions are still being finished. In addition, the neighboring La Brea park will soon close for renovation ahead of the 2028 Olympic Games. The galleries, although they appear to still be under construction due to the cement on the walls from which they hang everything from works by Rubens to Matisse, from Persian carpets to the arches of French abbeys, are already ready. The works are mixed, put together, in a space where there are hardly any walls, in a more thematic way, or as it used to be called, in an “encyclopedic museum.” The intention: thought, dialogue, asking questions.
“This term encyclopedic museum is particular to North America. There are no encyclopedic museums in Spain, nor in Mexico, not even the British Museum, with art from many regions,” explains Diana Magaloni, deputy director of LACMA and head of conservation, to this newspaper. The Mexican, former director of the National Museum of Anthropology, says that “encyclopedic museums were born with an ambition to contain the knowledge of the world, to contain the world’s collections for a North American public, who does not live in Europe, and to be able to look at the world from here with the ambition to educate.” For this reason, this museum is a mix of everything, from ancient Greek art almost glued to other contemporary African art; of Kyoto vases from the 21st century that go hand in hand with Dutch paintings from more than 800 years ago, with large-format photographs or with Egyptian mummies from the 1st century.
“It is more of a museum of cultures,” he reflects. “A global museum. And this is a city, I believe, the most multicultural that exists, and the fifth largest economy in the world,” he points out, referring to California. “And we owe it to that city.” For her, the arrival of the David Geffen Galleries, the Zumthor museum, the new 3,000 pieces, its union with the city, refresh and improve Los Angeles as a new artistic focus. “This makes it rise as a very important cultural power. It is true that many contemporary artists have moved from New York; there is a lot of new and very, very daring contemporary art.”
As the multicultural urban mass that it is, and with almost 50% of the Latin population, there is a strong presence of migrants. Two Mexican artists have two powerful works in the building, in the public plaza that surrounds it. The sculptor Pedro Reyes has brought from his workshop in Coyoacán an enormous head of volcanic stone, Tlali, weighing 80 tons. For her part, Mariana Castillo has been responsible for shaping the floor of the entire complex. A work of art of more than 19,200 square meters called Feathered Changes (Feathered Changes) that he has created for two years together with more than a hundred Mexican workers from Los Angeles. With shapes created with rakes and printed tracks of county animals, from coyotes to roadrunners, it can be enjoyed by all who come to LACMA, whether or not they pay admission.
“In this political moment in which we talk so much about territory, about migration, about origins, I think it has even more meaning that I was able to create this piece together with a Swiss architect in a museum in Los Angeles, and with Mexican brothers,” says Castillo, during a meeting with EL PAÍS and several patrons of the arts sponsored by the Mexican consul in Los Angeles in honor of both artists, on what he called “a very important day for Mexican culture.”
For Castillo, the work is something personal, the largest of his career, and it speaks of the passage, the importance of what we step on, of those who arrive before and after us. “Also about our bodies, about how we leave marks in the places we live. They can be subtle, they can be definitive, but there they are,” she explains to this newspaper, with which she also reflects on her role as an artist: if for centuries many artists have created murals and tapestries on walls and frescoes on ceilings, she now intervenes on the floor. “Now I say that I am an artist from the little onesor something like that, like a new category,” he laughs. “I’m interested in showing that horizontal surface on which we walk.”
As Vice Director Magaloni explained about the museum, whose collection is mostly made up of private donations, the works, their layout and approach are very different from more classic museums, whether European or American, such as the Philadelphia Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Met in New York. “We do not have a collection comparable to the Prado. We will never have one,” acknowledges the person in charge. “It is not a national museum, nor an imperialist museum, like the Louvre or the British. We have a collection that has many gaps, we do not have everything. We have two Rembrandts“.
Here everything comes together and intersperses, sometimes in a conversation that is natural; others, with difficulties to understand each other, seeking to make people uncomfortable. But, as the curator says, art also implies not only that old name of encyclopedia, with entries to knowledge, but also asking questions. “I think you have to trust art for its own sake. Its presence has the power of communication. Questions are mitigated by the beauty of the place. It is an experience that produces admiration.”