The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will reopen its new David Geffen Galleries on April 19, 2026, marking a major turning point for the largest museum in the Western United States. The opening will cap nearly 20 years of collaboration between Pritzker Prize–winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and LACMA’s director, Michael Govan.
For visitors, the reopening promises a radically different museum experience: a new building elevated above the street, 26 galleries arranged on a single level, and a reinstallation of its extensive permanent collection designed to encourage movement across cultures and time periods rather than along a fixed chronological route.
What is the new LACMA building?
The new building, titled the David Geffen Galleries, is a 100,000-square-foot glass-and-concrete exhibition space that stretches around 900 feet across Wilshire Boulevard on Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile.
Elevated above ground on concrete supports, it reshapes LACMA’s physical footprint and how visitors move through the campus.
Rather than organizing galleries across multiple levels or wings, the new museum places its 26 galleries on a single floor. That layout is meant to flatten traditional hierarchies in museum display and allow visitors to make their own path through the collection. Works are grouped in relation to major bodies of water—the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean Sea—rather than according to a strictly Western timeline.
The building also reorganizes the campus at ground level. LACMA’s education spaces, bookshop, dining areas, and a 300-seat auditorium sit below the elevated galleries, while nearly four acres of outdoor public space open around the structure.
When does LACMA reopen?
LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries officially open on April 19, 2026. That date marks the public reopening of the new building after a series of preview events, including an opening gala on April 16th.
The museum’s rollout extends beyond opening day. Members and donors will be able to see the inaugural installation from April 19th through May 3rd. After that, access expands to NexGenLA, the museum’s youth membership program for Los Angeles County residents. On April 22nd, Michael Govan and Peter Zumthor are scheduled to discuss the new building in a public conversation at LACMA’s East West Bank Commons. The museum brings its public program into high gear on June 20th, when Los Angeles gallerist Jeffrey Deitch runs his legendary Art Parade featuring artists, performers, and musicians on Wilshire Boulevard.
Perhaps most exciting to visitors and 10 million locals, though, is the opening of the Metro’s Wilshire/Fairfax station. One of three new subway stations on Wilshire Boulevard on the city’s Metro D (Purple) line, it opens on May 8th.
Who designed the new museum?
The David Geffen Galleries were designed by Peter Zumthor, the Pritzker Prize–winning Swiss architect known for stark, spare buildings that emphasize light, material, and contemplation. Though Zumthor lived in Los Angeles and briefly taught at Southern California’s SCI-Arc in the 1980s, this is his first completed building in the United States.
Zumthor is best known for projects including the Kolumba Kunstmuseum in Cologne, the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel in Germany, the Therme Vals baths in Switzerland, Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, and the 2011 Serpentine Pavilion in London. Across those projects, his designs often create a distinctly worshipful architecture for reflection and contemplation in filtered light and shadows that frame the world just outside them.
At LACMA, that approach manifests in a building defined by glass, concrete, and a strong horizontal form. The final design uses sand-colored concrete, a choice made in part to reduce cooling costs, and its shape responds partly to the neighboring La Brea Tar Pits landscape. Solar panels cover the roof, while the gallery level hovers above the street, creating a distinctive structure that is both monumental and unusually open.
What are the new LACMA commissions?
The reopening will include several new commissions and installations made for or highlighted by the new galleries. Among the artists with newly commissioned works are Todd Gray, Lauren Halsey, Do Ho Suh, and Diana Thater, each bringing a distinct approach to scale, space, and site.
The inaugural presentation will also feature major works from LACMA’s permanent collection and recent acquisitions, including Georges de la Tour’s The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame (1640), Henri Matisse’s La Gerbe (1953), Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), Vincent van Gogh’s Tarascon Stagecoach (1888), and Diego Rivera’s Flower Day (Día de flores) (1925).
Outside, the reconfigured campus introduces a sculpture display across nearly four acres of public space. That includes Alexander Calder’s Three Quintains (Hello Girls) (1964), originally commissioned for LACMA’s Wilshire Boulevard expansion in 1965, alongside works by Tony Smith, Auguste Rodin, Liz Glynn, Shio Kusaka, and Jeff Koons’s Split-Rocker (2000).
Together, these installations connect the museum’s architecture to the outdoor public realm, making the reopening as much about the campus as about the galleries themselves.
Why has LACMA’s redevelopment been controversial?
LACMA’s redevelopment has been debated almost since the project was announced. Critics objected to the demolition of older museum buildings and raised questions about whether the new design would reduce exhibition space rather than expand it. Others focused on the project’s cost, debt, and the move of replacing a more traditional museum campus with a single elevated structure.
Those concerns coalesced in Save LACMA™, a nonprofit formed in 2020 to oppose the plan. Full-page advertisements appeared in major newspapers, including the New York Times and L.A. Times. Some critics took issue with the design, and others have argued that the project sacrificed institutional memory and architectural range for a building they saw as too idiosyncratic.
At the same time, supporters argued that the plan offered a more flexible, contemporary way to display art and a more public-facing museum campus. Over time, revisions to the design and the promise of a more open, accessible site helped soften some of the backlash, even if the project remains divisive.
What LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries mean for LA’s cultural scene
The reopening of LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries will reshape not just one museum but a key stretch of Los Angeles’s cultural geography. Positioned on Museum Row alongside the La Brea Tar Pits, the Academy Museum, the Petersen Automotive Museum, and Craft Contemporary, LACMA’s new building reinforces the area as one of the city’s most important cultural corridors.
It also arrives at a moment when Los Angeles is rethinking how people move through the city. With the opening of the Wilshire/Fairfax Metro station, LACMA becomes more accessible by public transportation in a city long defined by car travel. That matters for a museum that receives close to 1 million visitors annually and serves a large local public as well as international tourists.
More broadly, the project signals both the ambition and the risk of major museum redevelopments today. LACMA’s new building is an attempt to rethink what an encyclopedic museum can look like, how its collection can be organized, and how its campus can function as civic space. Whether visitors see it as a bold correction or a controversial compromise, its reopening will shape conversations about museums in Los Angeles and beyond.
