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Everything You Need to Know About LACMA’s New David Geffen Galleries

LACMA has opened its new David Geffen Galleries, a single-story building spanning Wilshire Boulevard that houses the museum's permanent collection spanning 6,000 years of art. The galleries feature a revolutionary curatorial approach organized around bodies of water—Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian, and Pacific—creating nonhierarchical displays that mix works across time and geography, such as 17th-century Dutch paintings alongside 20th-century photography. The building also includes 3.5 acres of shaded public space below, outdoor sculptures by artists like Alexander Calder and Jeff Koons, and a 220,000-square-foot pavement artwork by Mariana Castillo Deball.

Painting LACMA's David Geffen Galleries with Light, Shadow, and Color

LACMA's new David Geffen Galleries, designed by architect Peter Zumthor, feature custom-tinted concrete walls that break from traditional museum aesthetics. The walls are coated with a transparent, nano-scale mineral glaze developed by Zumthor and Swiss craftsman Marius Fontana, manufactured by German company Keim. The palette—dusky red, vibrant blue, and nuanced black—was inspired by ancient Indigenous American pigments prepared by artist Porfirio Gutiérrez for the museum's exhibition "We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art." Diana Magaloni, LACMA's Senior Deputy Director for Conservation, Curatorial and Exhibitions, led the conceptualization and application of the glazes, which are designed to enhance the building's interplay of light and shadow without obscuring its raw concrete surfaces.