The David Geffen Galleries at Los Angeles County Museum of Art have been open for several months now and a recent visit had me thinking about how the dialogue between art + architecture is changing for the better. The building, designed by Swiss Architect, Peter Zumthor in collaboration with SOM (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) is a curvilinear, concrete structure that spans across Wilshire Blvd to create a meandering experience for the viewer. What struck me with the architecture was the movement to glass on the exterior so that the patron visiting can still feel the view and how it is a juxtaposition to the art inside.
Upon entering the space from the exterior stairs, you are dropped right into pieces from the permanent collection of the museum. There is no official way finding at the top of the stairs, which can be little disorienting at first. Do you look out at the views, enter one of the small gallery spaces on the interior or wander the outer perimeter through the galleries defined by their four bodies of water: The Atlantic, The Pacific, Mediterranean and Indian Ocean?
Works from ancient times coexist with more contemporary pieces and create a conversation that spans “continents and centuries”. The constant oscillation between light and dark from the exterior to the interior galleries, allows the viewer to become intimately involved with the works on display helping to define and select your own journey through the space. The building itself is suspended approximately 30’(feet) above Wilshire Blvd, creating a sweeping curvilinear mass clad in glass and houses gallery spaces all on one continuous floor. For a brief overview, starting on the perimeter and choosing your own direction seems the most logical. It allows you to take in the view, circle around sculptures and then veer off into smaller galleries to focus on a type of work or specific pieces from a period.
An item of note is the wall color in the smaller, inner gallery spaces. Three colors were chosen, for what Zumthor and CEO and LACMA Director, Michael Govan call “houses”; a reddish black, a Renaissance ultramarine blue, and a blackish burgundy, all meant to represent emerging from the darkness. The colors themselves are special pigments created with a secret formula that only two people in the museum know the ingredients for. The starting point for the pigments is two-fold and came first out of a desire to understand light and shadow which is formed from the artistry and science of Indigenous Americas and is tied to an exhibition called “We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art” and also the technical side of creating a custom glaze instead of regular paint you would see in a traditional gallery setting. While black and white photography and pieces with rich color worked well in these spaces, pieces with a more subtle coloration often tend to feel lost or washed out in the spaces. This is indicative of sculptures against the concrete volumes as well. An untitled smaller piece by Ruth Asawa was dwarfed in comparison to the massive concrete walls surrounding it.
As part of my own journey through the galleries, I was on mission to experience two works. First, Matisse’s La Gerbe (1953) - French for “The Sheaf” and a photograph called Run Up (2002) by Ken Gonzales Day whom I was a teaching assistant for in graduate school. La Gerbe was originally commissioned by Sidney F. Brody and his wife Francis Lasker Brody for a covered interior courtyard of their Holmby Hills home designed by local architect A. Quincy Jones. This piece was the last commission by Matisse and was later promised to LACMA by Francis for the 25th anniversary of the museum. It fittingly takes its place at the head of the building and can be seen clearly from the exterior, which brings it back to its original designed intention and connects local art patrons to the history of both the museum and Los Angeles.
The Ken Gonzales Day piece speaks of a more ominous history of California – Lynchings that took place in the 19th century. The work on first view, is a beautiful image of a tree but underneath a dark past is exposed. Documenting over 350 cases of Latinos of Mexican descent, Chinese, Native Americans and others between 1850 and 1935 are a reminder of a history that is often overlooked. Situated in a small gallery around the corner from the Matisse piece, this photograph quietly indexes California’s buried history of racial violence.
Histories of space and time are reflected throughout the galleries, giving viewers multiple opportunities to shape their own experience with each visit. The result is a collective history of the region and beyond, where architecture and art are in conversation, offering a thoughtful threshold as the museum steps into its next era. While small inconsistencies appeared throughout the museum the overall experience provided a welcome respite from the world outside.
Interesting - need to visit!
I’ve always loved La Gerbe! I want to see it person too.