My Visit to LACMA

I spent the holiday in LA this past December visiting my new niece, and my mom and two other siblings joined me in visiting baby Alexandra and her parents. There were many great laid back days full of morning audiences with her after her breakfast milk and poop, and cuddles as she took her nap, and cheering her on during tummy time, and playing the co-op videogame Overcooked. We also did some cooking, and take-out. As much as I adore baby cheeks though and the brief outings to get food, I knew I would get stir crazy. So there was one afternoon I also spent a few hours visiting LACMA, aka The Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

I recommend this area for anyone and everyone. Even if you don’t pay admission to see the inside of the museum, there are lots of free sights in the park in the surrounding area – I went back to walk in the park several times staying in the free areas. Here are the details of my visit to LACMA and sights I recommend and which I saw during my visit to LACMA.

La Brea Tar Pits

LACMA is in a park with the La Brea Tar Pits, and there were many people just pushing strollers or taking a walk (which also is home to many Pokestops). The tar pits are outside so you can view some of them without paying the admission fee, though you will want to go into the George Page museum to get more information and context beyond the signs outside, and to support them. Do note that since these tar pits are from the Ice Age, there are no dinosaurs, but you will find dramatic mammals like giant sloths, saber tooth cats, and mammoths.

You can probably visit the outside tar pits walking around within 20 minutes, and the museum, with its fossil exhibits and also 3-D theater, can take another hour or so. While walking outside, you may find several gates small squares where you can see the tar leaking up to the surface – we even found one of these on the sidewalk across from the park that they had covered with sand and tried to surround with some orange cones! I found it a really interesting juxtaposition between the natural history still occurring here in its rawness with the “Miracle Mile” and modern urbanity that surrounds it.

First Photo: This is Pit 9, which they think is the oldest excavation site. Thirty individual mammoths were found here in 1914. Second Photo: One of the many little gated square areas where you can see the tar under the ground coming to the surface

Urban Lights

One of the most famous and free (since it is an outdoor sculpture) art you can see in the park at LACMA is the iconic Urban Lights.
 

Created by Chris Burden, it is made of 202 restored street lamps in various styles based on where they were from (most are from southern California and there are some from Portland Oregon too!). The lamps are painted grey and assembled in a grid almost like an urban forest. In the daytime, it’s easier to see how they come together as lamps but there is enough light to also highlight their individual differences in the style of lamp, the height of the lamp, the detail of their posts.
    

The lights are solar powered and become lit in the evening. Here’s a look at dusk.
  

Metropolis II

If you buy your LACMA museum admission, there is another Chris Burden exhibit you can view inside one of the building Broad Contemporary Art Museum. This is Metropolis II, also a sculpture but a kinetic one. Some of the times, it is a mini city, frozen in time with a lot of Hot Wheel Cars and Miniature trains on bridges and roads throughout the multiple levels.
  
At other set times, the cars and trains whiz throughout at speeds ranging from bumper to bumper traffic ascending a bridge (almost like a roller coaster climbing anticipation) to then whiz down and around at speeds up to 240 miles per hour for a few hot minutes. Running at capacity, the sculpture can launch about 100,000 cars an hour with one operator looking out for cars misaligned or stuck on the tracks.

Penetrable

Let’s switch back to another free outdoor exhibit you can enjoy, but only until this February when this exhibit returns to the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. This is one that kids really enjoy- Jesús Rafael Soto’s “Penetrable“, also known as “Yellow Noodles” or “Spaghetti” sometimes. It’s a grid simply with yellow plastic hoses that viewers can interact with, instead of just viewing like so much normal art.

The way the art looks and your experience with it is altered based on where you are and who else is there within the exhibit, altering the lines of the hundreds of hoses. Kids and grown ups seemed to like wandering and turning and running through it.

Rain Room

One of the biggest impetus for this LACMA visit was to see the special exhibit Rain Room by art collective Random International. Already extended for more than a year and closing at the end of January (with tickets already sold out by December), the timed tickets limited viewers to a small group for 15 minutes. During that time, the audience is treated to a dark room illuminated with dramatic spotlight and torrents of rain controlled by technology that senses where a person is and makes it stop raining where you stand but continues to fall around you.
 

The light makes the rain visible, while making people into silhouettes. With nothing interrupting the rain, it almost sounds like you’re within a waterfall. You might feel like you’re in control of the weather – or do you feel like you’re continually under technology’s surveillance?

During its installation, LA was going through a drought – and a version of this work was purchased by a foundation in the Middle East, reminding me that although Portland is rich with rain, not everyone is. And even when it rains here, you don’t see as much joy or appreciation as during this purchased experience… What is the experience difference between those who were just walking through and those who saw it through a camera lens?
 

Although the exhibit was only temporary, I always encourage flipping through the art currently on display when visiting an area to see what special exhibits are going on that you might be able to catch. That’s how I found the Living Digital Spaces and Future Parks and how I found Rain Room!

Other LACMA Art Examples

This post is already way too long, but I wanted to share a few other art I admired with your price of admission to LACMA. I visited wtih my sister, brother, and mom, and we mainly were viewing the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and Pavilion for Japanese Art. I hope to view more of the other historical art some future visit – LACMA is home to five buildings. I also saw James Turrell’s Breathing Light, a free timed ticket you can get with admission but you have to reserve it on a tablet at the Wilshire ticket window and no photography is allowed. It is already a pretty surreal experience of losing context of space and depth perception vision and a camera couldn’t capture it anyway.

• Breadth Deep by Ry Rocklen, with concrete, pipe, VHS tape, Betamax tape, and automotive glass. Desktop Operation: There’s No Place Like Home (10th Example of Rapid Dominance: Em City)  by Glenn Kaino. A sculpture referencing the Emerald City of Oz on a enclosure referencing miniature Japanese zen garden that evolves based on seismic shifts and nearby urban redevelopment in the area.
  
• Proposal for America by Sam Durant; June 14, 2004 (Ronald Reason 1911-2004) by Mungo Thompson; Draped Marble (Carrara, St. Laurant, Brown Onyx) by Analia Saban. Marble mounted on steel on wooden sawhorse.
  
• Beyond Bling: Jewelry from the Lois Boardman Collection exploring jewelry created from nontraditional materials. Salmon Dream brooch and stand by Robin Kranitzky and Kim Overstreet made of wood, plexiglass, brass, silver, copper, polymer clay, printed paper, acetate, Micarta, and found objects; Koi Bracelet by David Bielander made of leather, thumbtacks and silver
  
• In the Pavilion for Japanese Art, LACMA has the largest collection of Japanese charms, or netsuke, from Raymond Bushell one of the most active and prolific collectors of netsuke – his collection ranges in time and variety is supposedly in the thousands, and 900 have been donated to LACMA – so many that they can’t all be displayed so they are rotated quarterly in the netsuke gallery. These miniature sculptures have a hole so they fit on corded hanging boxes used to carry money, medicine, etc. since kimono do not have pockets.
    

And here is one of many more sculptures you can view for free on the LACMA grounds: Levitated Mass by Michael Heizer.

Sights Nearby

Also in the nearby area are the Petersen Automotive Museum, The Grove Shopping Center including the Los Angeles Original Farmer’s Market, and you could wrap up with a Korean BBQ meal in Koreatown. Next to LACMA is also the future home of the The Academy of Motion Pictures Museum scheduled to open in 2018.

Some eats from Koreatown: some amazing Korean BBQ at Quarters, named for how each of the raw meat tapas you order to cook on the grill are 1/4 pound and if you order 5 of them Quarters provides complimentary vegetable skewer, cheese fondue for dipping meat, egg soup, and kimchee or soy bean stew; and Honeymee 100% natural milk ice cream with honeycomb

So you can combine all of these into a full day in the area. My personal feeling is that there is a lot of time in the car and not enough time walking in a lot of visits to LA unless you are doing one of the trails, and this area is just built for a lot of walking without requiring hiking or a stair workout.

Have you heard of the Tar Pits in LA before? Which of these exhibits at LACMA do you like, have you been on your own visit to LACMA? Have you heard the Urban Lights as one of the symbols of LA before?

Urban Light in the evening