The Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced that it will open its long-awaited new building, officially called the David Geffen Galleries, on April 19 to members, who will have access to the building ahead of the public for two weeks.
On Sunday, May 3, LACMA will offer access to members of its NexGenLA program, which offers free membership to LA County residents 17 and younger. Then on May 4, the expansion will officially open its doors to the public. (Members can now book reservations for the April 19–May 3 window on LACMA’s website.)
The public has already had a preview inside of the David Geffen Galleries, when LACMA opened up the completed building—empty ahead of the installation of its first permanent collection hang—for around two weeks last summer. The first evening preview was accompanied by a musical performance that the museum commissioned from composer Kamasi Washington that featured some 120 musicians spread throughout the new building.
Designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, the new building measures 900 feet long, crosses Wilshire Boulevard, and has 110,000 square feet of exhibition space. Once inside, visitors will see between 2,500 to 3,000 objects from its permanent collection displayed on a single level. The building’s design is meant to do away with hierarchies often associated with Western art museums, placing works from LACMA’s 15 curatorial departments—spanning from antiquity to today—alongside each other, with 45 curators working on it collaboratively.
Zumthor’s designs for the museum have not been without controversy, with the plans having to be redesigned after environmental reviews and critics likening the renderings of the redesigned structure to “a small-city airport terminal.”
The David Geffen Galleries have been in the works for over a decade and comes with a final price tag of $720 million. (That’s only slightly higher than the estimated $600 million it had budgeted back in 2014.) The museum completed a fundraising campaign of $750 million in 2023, receiving $117.5 million from L.A. County (or around 20 percent), with the rest coming from private donations. Those include $100 million from David Geffen and $50 million each from Elaine Wynn and the W.M. Keck Foundation.
In addition to the opening date, LACMA also announced that Willow Bay had been elected co-chair of its board of trustees, alongside current co-chair Tony Ressler. Bay fills the position long held by Elaine Wynn, who died last April. Bay, the dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, has been a trustee since 2007 and the board’s vice chair since 2015. Her support for LACMA includes donating the funds, along with her husband Bob Iger, the outgoing CEO of the Walt Disney Company, to provide long-term preservation of LACMA’s iconic outdoor work, Chris Burden’s Urban Light (2008).
In a statement, LACMA director and CEO Michael Govan said, “We are excited to be so close to completing the upgrade of the museum campus to increase gallery space and enhance the visitor experience. None of this would have been possible without the generosity and commitment of the County of Los Angeles, our board of trustees, donors, members, neighbors, and artists. We look forward to sharing this reimagined museum experience both with Angelenos and visitors from around the world.”
