MUSEUMS & ART
State of the Arts
Whether you prefer to ogle modern art or antiquities, Ice Age fossils or space shuttles, the Golden State’s wealth of world-class museums awaits. With more than 1,000 museums of all sizes across the state, there’s a lifetime of fine art, science, history and culture to explore, as well as weird and wonderful collections for every imaginable niche-interest, from Star Wars memorabilia to the legends of Bigfoot. While it’s impossible to do them all justice here, we’ve attempted to highlight the best of the best.
The Arts
Visiting LA? It’s easy to spend hours in the West’s largest art museum, the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art (LACMA). Downtown, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and Geffen Contemporary showcase the best in 20th- and 21st-century painting, sculpture and conceptual art. The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA LA), formerly the Santa Monica Museum of Art, is now housed downtown to great acclaim. The renowned Getty Museum includes both the modern Getty Center in the Brentwood district and the Getty Villa in Malibu, which focuses on Greek and Roman classical art. Pasadena’s Norton Simon displays European and Modern artists amid a serene sculpture garden. In nearby San Marino, The Huntington features an impressive
library, art collections and 120 acres of botanical gardens.
San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, in Lincoln Park, holds an extraordinary permanent collection and hosts top-notch exhibitions from around the world. In nearby Golden Gate Park, the de Young showcases the arts of Africa, Oceania and the New World. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) spans 10 dazzling floors of galleries and 45,000 square feet of free public art space. Across the Bay, the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) is dedicated to native arts, history and ecology, and sponsors many family-friendly events and hands-on activities.
Down the coast, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art deserves a nod for its ambitious and imaginative exhibitions. San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art features a variety of exhibits in the historic Jacob building downtown (its oceanfront La Jolla property is closed for expansion, soon to quadruple its gallery space). For photography buffs, there’s the excellent Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park, as well as The Annenberg Space for Photography in LA and Pier 24 Photography Museum in San Francisco.
Science
The California Science Center in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park presents exhibits for all ages on invention, space travel and life sciences—many of them interactive, all of them free! Ice Age enthusiasts and fossilphiles will love the popular and gloriously sticky La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, an active geological site in Midtown. San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences, in Golden Gate Park, features the impressive Steinhart Aquarium, a walk-through rainforest with free-ranging birds and butterflies, the world’s largest, all-digital planetarium and a “Living Roof” with 1.7 million native California plants. The long admission lines can be daunting, but it’s worth the effort. At Piers 15 and 17 on the Embarcadero, the legendary Exploratorium houses more than 650 interactive exhibits—including an amazing “Tinkerers’
Clock” and the crawl-through Tactile Dome.
Designed for explorers under eight, Sausalito’s Bay Area Discovery Museum is a pint-sized Wonderland dedicated to promoting creative thinking. And, while not a museum per se, the Monterey Bay Aquarium deserves to be included among the Wonders of the World for its astonishing displays of sea otters and jellies, mesmerizing three-story kelp forest and a staggering million-gallon “Outer Bay” tank.
Culture
California is a rare and enduring alloy of more than 50 ethnic groups. Its museums reflect the racial diversity and cultural history of this melting pot in microcosm. What follows is but a sample; there are many, many more to choose from.
San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum and Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD) provide fascinating insights into two of California’s most creative ethnic traditions. A visit to the Asian Art Museum in Civic Center is the next best thing to a trip along the ancient Silk Road.
In Long Beach, the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) features contemporary works of the New World. San Diego’s tiny-but-mighty New Americans Museum honors the cultural diversity of immigrants through art and storytelling in Liberty Station—also home to the Women’s Museum of California, one of just three museums in the country dedicated to women’s history.