LACMA opens the David Geffen Galleries, its new home for the permanent collection

On 19 April 2026 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art cut the ribbon on the David Geffen Galleries, a new building for its permanent collection designed by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. Members and donors had the first two weeks inside, and the galleries opened to the general public on 4 May. An opening gala on 16 April drew more than 820 guests and raised almost $11.5 million, a record for a LACMA fundraiser, according to the museum.

The horizontal concrete-and-glass structure is about 900 feet long, rests on a series of pavilions and stretches across Wilshire Boulevard, with a single exhibition floor raised above a new public garden. It provides 110,000 square feet of gallery space, and the project's cost was reported at more than $700 million, paid for by private donors together with Los Angeles County and the city. Rather than arranging art by period or medium, the opening installation, prepared by 45 curators from a collection of around 155,000 objects, groups works loosely around the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans and the Mediterranean, setting Spanish religious paintings, Persian antiquities, ancient Mexican ceramics and contemporary pieces in conversation. Reviews were mixed to positive: The Art Newspaper gave four stars, finding sculpture and decorative art especially powerful in the spaces while noting that delicate oil paintings can feel overwhelmed, and the architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne called the building bold and compromised in almost equal measure. An education centre, restaurant, bar and theatre were due to follow later in the year.

The building is named for David Geffen, the Brooklyn-born son of Jewish immigrants who founded Asylum Records, Geffen Records and, with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the DreamWorks studio. His $150 million pledge in 2017 was the largest gift to the project. Geffen's earlier philanthropy includes a $200 million unrestricted gift to the UCLA medical school, which bears his name.