LACMA

Date: 2026-05-09

Submitted: 2026-05-28 21:04:28

Visibility: World-readable

Riding the D and seeing art in Los Angeles

The last time I visited LACMA the museum was moving out of its old building on the north side of Wilshire in preparation for the building's demolition and replacement. The replacement opened to the public the week that the Metro D line opened (it had been open for a couple of weeks to museum members), and because I was already in LA for the opening of the D line, it seemed like I ought to visit the new galleries on Saturday, the 9th of May.

I rode the D to Wilshire/Fairfax and stepped out onto the station plaza, next to the Peterson Automotive Museum (so one could take the train to the car museum). Like yesterday there were passengers who had come out just to see the new line on its opening weekend, and Metro staff standing around to answer questions and generally support the new station.

I walked from the station along Fairfax, crossing Wilshire at the spot where, a few years ago, I looked into the station box under construction, now covered up with new asphalt. A few blocks north I jogged onto a side street, past expensive single-family homes that looked like they had been built as inexpensive tract houses around the middle of the last century but they were close enough to other urban development that the prices inexorably increased in the intervening three-quarters of a century. Even in front of multi-million-dollar homes the sidewalks were cracked and broken by the trees, which seems to be a problem all over Los Angeles, according to a Los Angeles Times column. (That column shows a guy wearing a t-shirt from local (Santa Cruz) pizza chain Pizza My Heart; I also saw several similar shirts in 48 hours in Los Angeles. Maybe I noticed them because I was out of Santa Cruz, but it felt like I saw more than I do in an average month in Santa Cruz.)

My destination was another Santa Cruz export, Verve Coffee, on West Third Street. Inside it looked just like my favorite third-wave coffee shop back home, complete with the same menu. It was shaping up to be a warm day in Los Angeles so I had a cold nitro flash brew coffee and an almond croissant.

I walked most of the way back to Wilshire Boulevard to LACMA to see the new David Geffen Galleries. (Since it was the first weekend the new galleries would be open to the public, I bought a timed ticket for 11:30 in advance; but I never followed up to check whether the tickets actually sold out.) Like any good art museum, the building itself was a stunning work of modern art, brought into being by first-rate engineering: the museum space was a sandwich between two giant slabs of raw concrete suspended above the ground on a massive pedestal. The edge of the flat concrete roof curved organically, stretching along Wilshire then reaching across the four-lane boulevard in a single clean span, touching down on south side of the road with a second entrance. From the end it looked like a UFO had touched down in the plaza; but seen in the plan view on the brochure I got the impression of a rather confused pancake.

Inside the brand-new galleries the space was divided into rooms separated by concrete walls stretching from the polished concrete floor to the concrete ceiling. (Somehow all this concrete did not echo endlessly, but I don't know how.) The featured pieces of art stood out against the austere surroundings they were displayed in, but the industrial concrete was always there in the back of my mind, like the unavoidable foundations of modern life.

The art itself represented a broad cross-section of thousands of years of human artistic history, in a kind-of-random assortment that felt like grazing because there was everything from pre-Colombian pottery and textiles to Arts-and-Crafts industrial design and medieval sacred art and photography and Buddhist sculpture, and just about every gallery had something new and interesting and almost entirely unlike whatever was in the adjacent galleries.

I walked the length of the building, grazing from the breadth of art on display, and departed the galleries feeling like I'd seen a little bit of everything.

I walked across the plaza to the contemporary art buildings and saw weird modern art: works by Picasso and Mondrian; an installation that recreated the feeling of an old garage filled with junk on a languid summer evening; dirt scooped up and dried in squares and mounted on the gallery wall; and a video projected on a wall that reenacted early contact and misunderstandings between the Hawaiian people and European explorers. The biggest installation, located on the ground floor (probably to support its no-doubt massive weight) was "Band", by Richard Serra, a ten-foot-tall ribbon of raw steel running back and forth across the floor, curving in and out and forming room-sized interior pockets of steel.

Opposite the building's lobby from "Band" was Sueño Perro: A Film Installation. A half-dozen movie projectors stood in a darkened gallery, lit only by the projectors themselves, presenting an endless loop of film onto the walls. (I was fascinated by the structure of the endless film loops; I watched the loops to figure out how they worked.) The air was hot and stuffy with the heat from the high-power projector bulbs, with a static charge from the constantly-moving film. Each projector played the raw audio from each scene, competing with each other and with the clacking of the projector and the whirring of the fans. The scenes came from the raw film shot for a Mexican movie twenty-five years ago; the filmmaker discovered the film carefully preserved in the Mexican archives (rather than lost on the cutting room floor, as he expected that it had been) and put it together in a sort of meditation on filmmaking. The whole effect was chaos; it was hard to tell what I was even looking at, or where I should be looking. But it was impossible to look away, and that's the whole point of cinema (and of art).

I looped back to see Metropolis II in action, with the conveyer belts bringing matchbox-sized cars up to the top of their raceways to descend on separate looping paths back down to ground level, only to start the whole cycle over again. The conveyer belts themselves seemed like hurry-up-and-wait traffic congestion, an unavoidable part of the Los Angeles experience. A human attendant stood in the middle of the miniature chaos, watching the mechanisms to keep the whole thing moving. This, too, was a chaotic mess, but at a different scale; and it was hard to look away.

I departed the museum complex and returned to the new metro station, where pictures of the museum's art covered the walls.

I ate supper at Redwhite Boneless Ramen in DTLA, a vegan fast-casual ramen place that served my bowl of ramen under a clear plastic dome infused with smoke. When I removed the dome to eat the smoke drifted over the table and permeated the noodle, which was an interesting experience.

I walked back to my hotel past Pershing Square a few minutes after sunset, just after the last light left the US Bank building in DTLA.