Pose in front of streetlights at 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. However, you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you didn't go beyond the photogenic installation. The collections at LACMA include modernist masterpieces, massive contemporary sculptures, traditional Japanese screens, and by far the best special exhibitions in all of Los Angeles. This is one of the things to do in 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.

You can find contemporary masters like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and local artist Ed Ruscha among the artwork; there are well-known modernists like Picasso, Mondrian, Klee, and Kandinsky; Impressionist and post-Impressionist works by artists like Cezanne, Gauguin, and Degas; a large number of works from Africa; and, in the (currently closed) Pavilion for Japanese Art, a variety of delightful works from the Far East. There is also a world-famous collection of Islamic art.

Don't miss: The Alexander McQueen exhibition, the Barbara Kruger retrospective, and the Friday night free jazz performances are back. The museum requires reservations, but if you make one for a weekday after 3pm and live in the county, entrance is free.