LACMA Announces 2025 Plans Toward 2026 Grand Public Opening of New David Geffen Galleries

LACMA Announces 2025 Plans Toward 2026 Grand Public Opening of New David Geffen Galleries

Elaine Wynn Wing Named in Recognition of Wynn's $50 Million Leadership Contribution

The New Steve Tisch Theater Will Anchor Plaza-Level Program Building Previews and Events Planned for June

(Los Angeles, CA-March 11, 2025) The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) today announced that the public will be able to begin exploring multiple features of the new David Geffen Galleries in summer 2025, as the museum prepares for the April 2026 opening of this new home for its permanent collection.

Major construction of the building, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor, was completed at the end of 2024, and LACMA has begun to move in key operating functions. While this process continues, the building and its surroundings will start to come to life with installations of outdoor sculpture, the openings of dining and retail spaces, and special preview events.

Named in recognition of David Geffen's extraordinary $150 million gift, the new building, for which the County of Los Angeles invested $125 million, straddles Wilshire Boulevard, with floating staircases as well as elevators allowing access into the exhibition-level galleries from both the north and south sides of the boulevard.

The north wing is named the Elaine Wynn Wing in recognition of trustee and board co­-chair Elaine Wynn's leadership contribution of $50 million that launched the Building LACMA campaign to build the new galleries. The south wing of the galleries has not yet been named.

"The Geffen Galleries are both a stunningly beautiful work of architecture and a hub of the dynamic activity across LACMA's entire campus," said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director.

"Our board co-chair Elaine Wynn's significant pledge in 2016 was a meaningful catalyst for many others to throw their support behind the new LACMA. I am also grateful to our trustee Steve Tisch, whose generosity is helping LACMA create welcoming, accessible spaces on our campus for all of Los Angeles to enjoy.

We're excited that visitors from both near and far can begin to experience the impact of this amazing building this year, as we ramp up toward the 2026 grand opening celebration. Harnessing the power of art to console, we also hope to be a part of the spiritual healing of Los Angeles as it recovers from the recent unprecedented fires."

Amenities on the Plaza Level Will Begin to Open in Summer 2025

In summer 2025, the public will begin to see the plaza level of the new building north of Wilshire Boulevard. Later, LACMA will begin opening amenities, including Ray's and Stark Bar, which will re-open in a new space, and a new LACMA Store, made possible by a major campaign gift by LACMA trustee and donor Kelvin Davis and his wife, Hana.

In 2026 that restaurant and store will be complemented by a second restaurant, located on the south side of Wilshire Boulevard and named in honor of campaign gifts by LACMA trustee Ann Colgin, her husband, Joe Wender, and LACMA trustee Ryan Seacrest, as well as a new cafe on the north side of Wilshire Boulevard, named in recognition of a gift by LACMA trustee Ashley Merrill and her husband, Marc.

Protected and shaded by the galleries above, the exterior ground level is designed to accommodate outdoor dining, education, events, and artwork. Located north of Wilshire Boulevard, East West Bank Commons, named for a generous $10 million gift by Pasadena-based East West Bank and its Foundation to enhance and expand art education programs at LACMA, can hold events of up to 500 people outside and under cover. Other spaces are designed for outdoor concerts, films, and lectures.

The new W.M. Keck Education Center, a central destination on the W.M. Keck Plaza, north of Wilshire Boulevard, will offer a broad range of education and public programs to visitors of all ages.

Anchoring the plaza-level of the building, a state-of-the-art theater, located south of Wilshire Boulevard, will be the new home for LACMA's robust schedule of film screenings, lectures, discussions, musical performances, and other public programs. Named the Steve Tisch Theater in recognition of LACMA trustee Steve Tisch's gift to the campaign, it will function as a gallery during the day, showcasing time-based media works.

Major New Outdoor Artworks Join Long-Time Favorites on Campus

The new Geffen Galleries have created 3.5 acres of park-like public space on both sides of Wilshire Boulevard. The entire ground plane of the 75,000-square-foot expanse of the W.M. Keck Plaza on the north side of Wilshire Boulevard will become a commissioned artwork by Mariana Castillo Deball titled Feathered Changes, which will also extend to the south side. One of the new restaurants will house a monumental textile piece, Threading the Boundless. Ommdirectional Terrain, by Los Angeles-based Sarah Rosalena.

A number of outdoor works by artists, both new and familiar to the collection, will appear over time around the building. Artists will include Liz Glynn, Thomas Houseago, Shio Kusaka, Pedro Reyes, and Diana Thater, among others.

In addition, LACMA will begin to welcome back beloved sculptures that have become synonymous with the museum. These include Tony Smith's monumental Smoke (1967), followed later by Alexander Calder's iconic Three Quintains (Hello Girls) (1964), originally commissioned by the museum when it moved to Wilshire Boulevard in 1965.

LACMA's significant collection of large-scale works by Auguste Rodin will also return to greet the museum's visitors in an 8,000-square-foot garden along the north side of Wilshire Boulevard. Funded by decades-long supporters of LACMA, Iris and Bernie Cantor and the Cantor Foundation, the new Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Garden will feature Rodin's most iconic works in a beautiful, newly designed setting.

Previews of the New Building

Beginning in June 2025, groups, including LACMA donors and members, will have the opportunity to preview the dramatic spaces inside the building, seen in their raw state before art installation begins. LACMA will also activate the building with site­ specific musical performances by Kamasi Washington on June 26-28. In spring 2025, tickets for these performances will become available to the public, with a portion reserved for members.

Art Installation and Grand Opening

Later this year (2025), LACMA will begin the intricate process of installing thousands of artworks from its permanent collections for the public opening of the galleries in 2026.

Support for the Building LACMA Campaign

To date, in addition to the County of Los Angeles and David Geffen, LACMA board of trustees co-chair Elaine Wynn, the W.M. Keck Foundation, LACMA's board of trustees, and many other donors from a wide range of industries and creative communities have contributed more than $840 million to the Building LACMA campaign, surpassing the $750 million goal.

About Mariana Castillo Deball's Feathered Changes

LACMA sits on land that was a nourishing marshy ecosystem for thousands of years. The location produced a trove of fossils discovered during site preparation. To connect the new building to the history of its site, artist Mariana Castillo Deball is creating the commissioned artwork Feathered Changes, which will spread over the new building's hardscape in an expansive meditation on time, geologic history, and the LACMA site.

A series of islands scattered across the east campus will be surrounded by a brushed pattern inscribed into the plaza with a method closely related to both the way concrete is textured before it is set with a broom or rake, and the techniques used in dry Zen gardens to create patterns in sand, reflecting possible circulation routes throughout the plaza and the organic shape of the building.

The concrete islands are imprinted with fragments of the artist's feathered serpent drawings, based on fragments of ancient murals from Teotihuacan. The Feathered Serpent is an old Mesoamerican symbol representing the connection between the earth and the sun, soil and water, place and transformation.

The installation will also be inscribed with animal tracks native to California, creating an organic drawing on the surface of the huge ground plane. With Feathered Changes, Castillo Deball acknowledges the many Indigenous people of the Los Angeles area and their connections to the larger Indigenous histories on our continent.

Castillo Deball lives in Mexico City and Berlin, where she teaches at Munster Academy of Art. In 2017 LACMA acquired Vista de Ojos (2014), which was exhibited in the museum's 2021-22 exhibition Mixpantli: Contemporary Echoes. Castillo Deball has also been commissioned by LA Metro to create Four Pleated Landscapes: Fossil Ground, Woven Cienega, Medicinal Flora, and Urban Desert Fauna for the nearby Wilshire/La Cienega Station on the D Line Extension.

About Sarah Rosalena's Threading the Boundless: Omnidirectional Terrain

Sarah Rosalena is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist and scholar who received LACMA's Art+Technology Lab grant in 2019. Her art practice combines ancient craft techniques with advanced technologies to create tactile artworks while addressing decolonial posthumanism issues. She often draws upon skills learned during her childhood in Northeast Los Angeles, such as Indigenous handweaving and dyeing techniques from her Wixarika maternal heritage and scientific knowledge from her grandfather, an astrophysicist who pioneered aerospace engineering working on the Mission Control for the Voyager Program.

For one of the new restaurants, Rosalena created her largest digital weaving pattern from 60,000 images of the surface of Mars taken by the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to alter and weave on a large jacquard-rapier loom capable of weaving an 11 x 26.5-foot textile with 12,702 warp threads at the TextielLab in Tilburg, Netherlands.

Rosalena's fusion of computer programming and weaving transforms detailed imaging data from Mars into a richly woven textile based on patterns of Earth. This intricate work will create a colorful, detailed, woven terrain that beautifully intertwines technologies of the past and future while confronting understandings of mapping, colonization, and power exchanges.

The newly commissioned work is based on a textile series, Above Below, created in 2020, one of which is in LACMA's permanent collection, as well as in the Getty PST ART exhibition at LACMA, Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures.

About Steve Tisch

Since joining LACMA's board in 2010, Steve Tisch has been a generous and steadfast supporter of acquisitions, exhibitions, and capital projects including the campaign for the David Geffen Galleries. A renowned collector, he has championed the museum's art and film initiative, and his support has made possible acquisitions, especially significant works in time-based media by artists including Steve McQueen, Pierre Huyghe, and Catherine Opie, and the staging of major retrospectives of John Baldessari and Stanley Kubrick.

In recognition of his generosity to the campaign for the Galleries, the building's theater will be named for Mr. Tisch. The Steve Tisch Theater will serve as the new home for LACMA's robust schedule of film screenings, lectures, discussions, musical performances, and other public programs, and will function as a gallery during the day, showcasing time-based media works.

Mr. Tisch is chairman, co-owner, and executive vice president of the New York Giants and an Oscar-winning producer. For more than four decades, Tisch has successfully produced compelling stories in film and television, from the landmark television movie, The Burning Bed, to Risky Business, the sleeper hit that helped launch Tom Cruise's career. Other notable films include The Pursuit of Happyness, The Weather Man, American History X, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and Forrest Gump, which was named Best Picture at both the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes.

Mr. Tisch is an active philanthropist across the arts, health, and education. He has generously contributed his time and resources to such organizations as The H.E.L.P. Group and the ERAS Center. He is a founding trustee of The Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, is on the Board of Advisors of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and The Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University.

Tisch's commitment to providing educational opportunities for students to learn and grow are exemplary. He is the naming benefactor of the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University and has established endowed scholarships at University of California, Los Angeles, Tufts University, Georgetown University, and Duke University.

About LACMA

Located on the Pacific Rim, LACMA is the largest art museum in the western United States, with a collection of more than 150,000 objects that illuminate 6,000 years of artistic expression across the globe. Committed to showcasing a multitude of art histories, LACMA exhibits and interprets works of art from new and unexpected points of view that are informed by the region's rich cultural heritage and diverse population.

LACMA's spirit of experimentation is reflected in its work with artists, technologists, and thought leaders as well as in its regional, national, and global partnerships to share collections and programs, create pioneering initiatives, and engage new audiences.

Location: 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036. lacma.org