The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has opened its new David Geffen Galleries, designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, in April 2026. The museum also mounted an exhibition by Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan, featuring his work *The Encyclopedia of Invisibility* (2018), which critiques the traditional encyclopedic museum model by rewriting the *Encyclopaedia Britannica* from non-white, non-Western perspectives. The new galleries organize the permanent collection around four bodies of water—the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, and the Mediterranean Sea—rather than by medium, period, or nation, emphasizing migration and cultural exchange.
This matters because LACMA's rehang represents a significant institutional attempt to address the problematic legacy of the encyclopedic museum, which has been criticized as a Western construct rooted in colonialism and Eurocentrism. The approach, formulated by director Michael Govan after discussions with 45 curators, offers a novel solution to displaying global art without privileging Western narratives. The article argues that despite earlier criticism of the building's design and budget, the new galleries provide a more satisfactory and thoughtful model for presenting diverse cultural heritage in a contemporary museum context.