I love museums. Ironically, when I travel, I hardly ever go to them because to adequately see a museum takes up a lot of time, time which I do not always have when travelling to distant areas. However, when I have the time and am not rushed I love museums and Los Angeles has their fair share of museums. This weekend was a double treat because not only did I get to visit a museum I got to spend time with an old friend from my college days!

I have a few very close friend, unfortunately, the times between seeing them are often months and in some cases years. But they are always there, in my memory and in my heart. And when reunified it is as if no time has went by and you pick up right where you left off. My friend Dan is one such friend! The museum we went to was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art or LACMA as we call it here in Los Angeles.

LACMA shares the same land area as the La Brea Tar Pits. I remember as a child going there with my parents and enjoyed the tar pits but thought the art museum was God awful boring! I returned to LACMA in 1989 for Humanities Class and had to do a report on Art of the 1920’s. Well, it’s been 19 years since I’ve been there and a lot had changed. The expansion and acquisitions have grew enormously as well as my soul, knowledge and thirst for the humanities. It was also a nice place to meet up with my friend as it is condusive to talking, conversing, and enjoying something new together.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the official and world-renowned art museum of the County of Los Angeles, California located on Wilshire Boulevard along Museum Row in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. The museum is adjacent to the George C. Page Museum and La Brea Tar Pits.

LACMA is the largest encyclopedic museum west of Chicago. Its holdings include more than 250,000 works spanning the history of art from ancient times to the present. In addition to art exhibits, the museum features film and concert series throughout the year.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was established as a museum in 1961. Prior to this, LACMA was part of the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art, founded in 1913 in Exposition Park near the University of Southern California. In 1965 the museum moved to a new Wilshire Boulevard complex as an independent, art-focused institution, the largest new museum to be built in the United States after the National Gallery of Art.

The museum was built in a style similar to Lincoln Center and the Los Angeles Music Center and consisted of three buildings: the Ahmanson Building, the Bing Center, and the Lytton Gallery (renamed the Frances and Armand Hammer Building in 1968). The board selected LA architect William Pereira over the directors' recommendation of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the buildings. The LA Music Center and LACMA were concurrent large civic projects which vied for attention and donors in Los Angeles.

The museum's Pavilion for Japanese Art, designed by maverick architect Bruce Goff, opened in 1988, as did the B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Garden of Rodin bronzes. In 1994, LACMA purchased the adjacent May Company Department Stores building, an impressive example of streamline modern architecture designed by Albert C. Martin Sr. LACMA West increased the museums' size by 30 percent when the building opened in 1998. On a side May Company Department Store on Wilshire and Fairfax, was where my mom worked when she first moved to California from Chicago in 1956!

LACMA's more than 250,000 objects are divided among its numerous departments by region, media, and time period and are spread amongst the various museum buildings.

The Modern Art collection is displayed in the Ahmanson Building which was renovated in 2008 to have a new entrance featuring a large staircase, conceived as a gathering place similar to Rome's Spanish Steps. Filling the atrium at the base of the staircase is Tony Smith's massive scuplture Smoke (1967). The modern collection on the plaza level displays works from 1900 to the 1970s, largely populated by the Janice and Henry Lazaroff collection. The plaza level galleries house African art and a gallery highlighting the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. The second floor of the Ahmanson Building has Greek and Roman Art galleries.

The Art of the Americas Building has American, Latin American and pre-Columbian collections displayed on the second floor and temporary exhibition space on the first floor. The Hammer Building houses the Korean and Chinese collections.

The Contemporary Art collection is displayed in the 60,000 square foot Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM), opened on February 16, 2008. BCAM's inaugural exhibition featured 176 works by 28 artists of postwar Modern art from the late 1950's to the present. All but 30 of the works initially displayed came from the collection of Eli and Edythe Broad.

Surrounding the BCAM building the museum courtyard is a 100 tree palm tree garden, designed by artist Robert Irwin and landscape architect Paul Comstock. Some of the 30 varieties of palms are in the ground, but most are in large wooden boxes above ground. Directly in front of the new entrance to LACMA on Wilshire Boulevard is Chris Burden's Urban Light (2008), an orderly, multi-tiered installation of 202 antique cast-iron lampposts from various cities in and around the Los Angeles area. The lamp posts are functional, turn on in the evening, and are powered by solar panels on the roof of the Grand Entrance.

As you can see, the grounds, building, and collection are enough to keep you busy for days on end. I msyelf and partial to Antiquities, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic art periods so many of the exhibits I skimmed through. After admiring the art we sat at one of the two cafes enjoying beverages and remeniscing about old times and discussing current times.

Adjacent to LACMA are the La Brea Tar Pits and George C. Page Museum…but those are for another Trip of the week! Visit Rhoades Less Traveled next week for a visit to the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion at the Los Angeles Music Center and my very first Opera “Tosca”.