Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Over the past ten years, Chris Burden's Urban Light, a work composed of 202 cast-iron street lamps collected from all over Los Angeles and brought back to life, has quickly established itself as one of the city's most recognizable landmarks. Most visitors will undoubtedly associate the museum with this piece. But if you don't go beyond the photogenic installation, you'd be doing yourself a disservice. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is one of the Best Museums To Visit In Los Angeles. The collections at LACMA include modernist masterpieces, massive contemporary pieces (like Richard Serra's massive swirling sculpture and Chris Burden's buzzing, hypnotic tangle of toy cars in Metropolis II), and traditional Japanese screens, and by far the best special exhibitions in all of Los Angeles.

The 20-acre complex of buildings where LACMA has kept its encyclopedic collections, which have long been the most stunning in the city, has been quite the opposite. As a result, the eastern half of the campus has been leveled, and work is now begun on a replacement single-building that will reopen in 2024. In the meanwhile, LACMA's permanent collections have been dispersed throughout the Resnick Pavilion and Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM), both of which were designed by Renzo Piano (the much-loved modern collection specifically has been moved into the bright, spacious third-floor galleries in BCAM).

As for the artwork, you'll find works by modern masters like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and local artist Ed Ruscha, as well as well-known modernists like Picasso, Mondrian, Klee, and Kandinsky, Impressionist and post-Impressionist works by artists like Cezanne, Gauguin, and Degas, a well-known collection of Islamic art, a ton of artwork from Africa, and, in the (currently closed)

Google Rating: 4.6/5.0

Location: 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles 90036
Contact: www.lacma.org323-857-6000
Price: L.A. County Residents: $20, seniors and students $16, 17 and under free; Mon–Fri after 3pm free. Non-residents: $25, seniors and students $21, ages 13–17 $10, 12 and under free. Free every second Tue of the month.
Opening hours: Mon, Tue, Thu 11am–6 pm; Fri 11 am–8 pm; Sat, Sun 10am–7 pm; closed Wed