A trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art during the last two years.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is located on Wilshire Blvd. in the Miracle Mile area.  The museum is next to the Page Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits.  LACMA is the largest art museum in the Western United States and was established as a museum in 1961.  Prior to 1961, the museum was part of the Los Angeles Museum of Science, History and Art that was founded in 1910 in Expostion Park near USC.  Howard F. Ahmanson, Sr. made the first donation of $2M and convinced the museum board that enough funds could be raised to establish the new museum.  In 1965, the museum moved to a new location on Wilshire Blvd., as an independent, art-focused institution.  It was the largest new museum to be built in the United States after the National Gallery of Art.  The museum was built in a style similar to the Lincoln Center and the Los Angeles Music Center.  There were three buildings-the Ahmanson building, the Bing Center and the Lytton Gallery, which was renamed the Frances and Armand Hammer Building in 1968.  The board selected a Los Angeles architect whose name was William Pereira.

During the 1980's, money poured into LACMA to the tune of $209 million in private donations.  The collection of modern and contemporary art was growing and to provide more space for exhibitions, the museum hired the architectural firm of Hardy, Holzman, Pfeiffer Associates to design its $35.3 million, 115,000 square foot Robert O. Anderson Building for 20th century art, which opened in 1986 and was renamed the Art of the Americas building in 2007.  The Pavilion for Japanese Art was designed by Bruce Goff and opened in 1988, as did the B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Garden of Rodin bronzes.    In 1994,  LACMA purchased the adjacent May Department Stores building, which is a good example of streamline moderne architecture designed by Albert C. Martin Sr.  This building increased the museums's size by30% when the building opened in 1998.  There are more changes planned for LACMA planned for the future.

Pictures taken in 2011

Pictures taken in 2012 from a Stanley Kubrick exhibit we went to see.