The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently announced that the public would finally be able to preview its new, long-awaited $720 million building starting in June. There will be tours for members and donors along with musical performances by the composer and bandleader Kamasi Washington.
But there still won’t be any art in the museum, which is not scheduled to open until April 2026. To answer the question of how the building, Geffen Galleries, will be organized and what will be on view, a reporter sat down with four of the museum’s curators and their boss, LACMA’s director, Michael Govan.
The discussion offered a glimpse into the animated debate that the museum’s 45 curators have been engaged in over the last five years, reimagining how the institution should present art in its curvaceous, Peter Zumthor-designed building crossing Wilshire Boulevard.
Their different disciplines will relate to each other in fluid new ways, they explained, challenging business as usual.
“It allowed us to sort of start from scratch,” said Leah Lehmbeck, the head of the departments of European Painting and Sculpture and American Art, by “rethinking traditional silos and hierarchies.”
In undertaking this project, LACMA has joined a wholesale re-examination of the traditional Eurocentric, white-male-dominated canon that is currently underway at institutions around the United States that historically marginalized other voices and perspectives.
