LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

LACMA is the largest art museum in the western United States — a multi-building campus on Wilshire Boulevard's Miracle Mile that houses 150,000 works spanning 6,000 years, from ancient Assyrian reliefs to contemporary installations. The museum's most photographed feature is 'Urban Light,' Chris Burden's 2008 installation of 202 restored vintage Los Angeles street lamps arranged in a geometric grid at the museum's entrance — an artwork that has become the de facto symbol of LA's cultural scene and the most Instagrammed artwork in the city.

The collection's strength is its breadth — LACMA is one of the few American museums that treats art from every continent with equal seriousness. The Japanese Pavilion (designed by Bruce Goff) houses one of the finest collections of Japanese art outside Japan. The Korean art galleries are the most comprehensive in the US. The Latin American and Islamic art collections are nationally significant. The European painting collection includes works by Rembrandt, Monet, and Magritte, and the contemporary galleries feature major pieces by Koons, Hockney, and Kiefer.

The museum is undergoing a massive transformation — the Peter Zumthor-designed replacement building (to be called the David Geffen Galleries) has been under construction since 2020 and will replace several of the existing buildings with a single elevated structure spanning Wilshire Boulevard. The construction has reduced the museum's display capacity temporarily, but the temporary exhibitions and the surviving galleries (particularly the Pavilion for Japanese Art and the Broad Contemporary Art Museum wing by Renzo Piano) remain open and excellent.