LACMA, the largest art museum in the western United States, rises in front of you. LACMA — the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — opened on this site in 1965, having outgrown its previous location inside the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park. Its collection of more than 150,000 works spans five thousand years and every continent, with particular strength in South and Southeast Asian art, Islamic art, and American art.
The outdoor installation Urban Light by Chris Burden, the grid of 202 antique cast-iron street lamps at the museum's entrance on Wilshire Boulevard, has become one of the most photographed public artworks in Los Angeles — lit every evening, it creates a glowing forest at the edge of the sidewalk. The museum complex has been through multiple expansions and is undergoing its largest redesign yet, with a new building spanning Wilshire Boulevard designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor that will consolidate the scattered campus into a single structure. The Hammer Building and the Ahmanson galleries are currently the primary exhibition spaces.
Admission is free on the second Tuesday of each month.