Lynda and Stewart Resnick have donated a monumental Jeff Koons Split-Rocker sculpture to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which will exhibit the 37-foot-tall work near a newly created group of galleries endowed by trustee David Geffen.
Split-Rocker contains a metal skeleton and resembles the head of a children’s toy, with one half recalling rocking horse and the other a dinosaur. Planted in its surface are 50,000 flowers. Another comparably sized edition is housed at Glenstone, the Maryland private museum of Mitchell Rales and Emily Wei Rales.
The version gifted by the Resnicks to LACMA has been in Versailles and Rockefeller Center in New York. LACMA did not specify the value of the sculpture, as is common when museums announce gifts of artworks, but the Resnicks listed an unnamed piece given to LACMA on their 2023 tax filings and valued it at $9.6 million.
The Resnicks have a history of patronizing LACMA, which named a pavilion after them after they agreed to give $45 million toward its endowment. They also gave LACMA $16 million in the fiscal year ending in 2023, according to public filings for the Resnicks’ charitable foundation. Between 2019 and 2023, they provided more than $750 million went to Caltech for climate research.
Much of their funding has been focused around the environment, even amid scrutiny from climate activists over their business practices. A series of lawsuits have also centered around Stewart Resnick’s farming and food holding company, which has reported $4 billion in revenue in recent years.
The criticism over the reach of Resnicks in California reached LACMA in November 2023, when protesters gathered outside of the museum’s annual gala, targeting the philanthropists because they have lobbied for water-supply privatization.
The acquisition is part of LACMA director Michael Govan’s long-term aim to install another major sculpture on the museum’s campus, one that can compete in scale with others already there, among them Chris Burden’s Urban Light and Tony Smith’s Smoke.
It’s not the first time LACMA has tried to show a monumental Koons on its campus. In 2007, the museum’s plans to install a different large-scale work by Koons, a 70-foot steam train model from 1943 suspended from an industrial-sized crane, fell through, despite gaining some support while Govan was overseeing the proposal. Reported estimates put the cost of the project at roughly $25 million.
