Los Angeles gets ready for the World Cup and the Olympics
If the David Geffen Galleries and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art are the starry new additions to Los Angeles’s cast of blockbuster artistic attractions, then the SoFi Stadium (pictured above) is the sports equivalent. Opened in 2020, it is the most expensive stadium in the world, costing more than $6bn in today’s money. Situated in Inglewood, close to Los Angeles International Airport, the stadium has a capacity of up to 100,000 spectators and is covered by a translucent plastic roof, as well as an attached music and theatre venue. As well as being home to two National Football League teams—the Los Angeles Rams and the Los Angeles Chargers—the SoFi will be at the centre of the sporting world for the next several years. This summer, it will host eight games of the Fifa World Cup, including the United States’ opening group game, and one of the quarter finals. In 2027 it will host the Super Bowl and the following year it will co-host the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games alongside the famed Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. That will be the third time Los Angeles has hosted the games.
A view of Susan Silton’s WE, OUR, US at Wilshire/Fairfax Station © 2026 LA Metro
Ride to Metro’s new art-filled D Line stations
For the longest time, the closest Metro station to LACMA was three miles to the east, but on 8 May three new stations will be inaugurated, bringing riders right to the museum’s doorstep. The new Wilshire/Fairfax station will put museum-goers just six stops, or around 17 minutes, away from downtown Los Angeles. Appropriately, given its location on the city’s ‘Museum Row’, the station puts art front and centre with three new site-specific commissions by LA-based artists. For his mural commission on the station’s upper levels, Hands and Things, Karl Haendel incorporated large images of a wide range of functional objects from nearby museums, which are brandished by giant hands. On the concourse level, Ken Gonzales-Day has created large-scale glass murals featuring images of artefacts from LACMA’s collection. And positioned above the train platform, Susan Silton’s commission WE, OUR, US pairs vertical bands of colour with quotations by US president Abraham Lincoln and the Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldúa in English, Korean and Spanish—three languages widely spoken in the neighbourhood. The two other stations opening in May, Wilshire/La Brea and Wilshire/La Cienega, will be art attractions in their own right, too, with site-specific commissions by Eamon Ore-Giron, Fran Siegel, Mark Dean Veca, Soo Kim and Todd Gray.
The mural Monument of Love: Mother and Child by El Mac, Augustine Kofie & Aise is part of Destination Crenshaw Courtesy of Destination Crenshaw
Destination Crenshaw comes into view
An ambitious initiative billed as the “largest Black public art project in the US”, Destination Crenshaw has been taking shape along a 1.3-mile stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard in south Los Angeles for the better part of a decade since its founding by Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Los Angeles’s current city council president. And while its most distinctive feature, a partly elevated green space and structure dubbed Sankofa Park, has yet to be inaugurated, the boulevard and adjacent blocks are already dotted with murals paying tribute to the neighbourhood’s residents and heritage. Eventually, the city’s plan is to build ten small parks, plant over 800 trees and install more than 100 pieces of public art, including commissions by Alison Saar, Melvin Edwards, Brenna Youngblood and Maren Hassinger.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is due to open in September Patrick Price
Two new museums to open this year
The other big museum opening in Los Angeles this year is the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, several miles south-east of LACMA in Exposition Park. The $1bn museum has been co-founded by the creator of Star Wars, George Lucas, and his wife Mellody Hobson, and is dedicated to ‘narrative art’ in all forms: illustrations, mural paintings, comics and, of course, concept art and ephemera from the movies. The museum’s permanent collection features more than 40,000 items, including works by Frida Kahlo, Ernie Barnes and Lucas Cranach the Elder. The appropriately spaceship-looking building, which was designed by Ma Yansong of Mad Architects, opens on 22 September. Also opening in Los Angeles this year (date to be announced) is Dataland, “the world’s first museum of AI arts”, created by artist Refik Anadol.
A rendering of the planned renovation of the La Brea Tar Pits Courtesy Of Nhmlac
Prehistoric site to be brought up to date
LACMA’s immediate neighbour, the La Brea Tar Pits, is next in line for a transformation. The pits are an important palaeontological site, where natural tar has bubbled up from the ground for tens of thousands of years, trapping and preserving the prehistoric animals who were unwary enough to wander in. Hundreds of thousands of specimens have been unearthed, including skeletons of mammoths and dire wolves. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles is currently halfway through a $240m fundraising campaign to renovate the site in time for the 2028 Olympics. The project, designed by the architecture firm Weiss Manfredi, will include the creation of a mile-long looping pedestrian walkway, outdoor classrooms and the establishment of a centre for Ice Age research.
