Nearly $3 billion in museum construction is underway or recently completed in Los Angeles. LACMA opens its $835 million Peter Zumthor expansion next month. George Lucas is building a $1 billion narrative art museum in Exposition Park. The Broad is adding $100 million in new gallery space. By the time the 2028 Olympics arrive, the city's museum infrastructure will look nothing like it did five years ago.
Here's where to go right now — and what's coming next.
1. The Getty Center
Richard Meier's hilltop campus remains the most complete museum experience in Los Angeles. The permanent collection spans European paintings, decorative arts, drawings, manuscripts, and photography, with particular strength in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works. The architecture itself — all travertine and glass, set against the Santa Monica Mountains — is the kind of building that makes you walk more slowly. Admission is free. Parking is $20. The tram ride up the hill is part of the experience. The Getty Villa in Malibu, focused on Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities, operates as a separate campus — also free, also worth the trip.
2. LACMA (Opening April 2026)
The David Geffen Galleries, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor, open to the public on April 19, 2026 — LACMA's 60th anniversary. The 347,500-square-foot building floats over Wilshire Boulevard, nearly doubling the museum's gallery space with 110,000 additional square feet. Early reactions have been mixed: architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne described it as "bold and compromised in nearly equal measure." Zumthor's glass walls invite visitors to look out at the city while viewing art — a design philosophy that treats Los Angeles itself as part of the exhibition. The $835 million project has faced years of delays and cost overruns, but the building represents LACMA's bet that physical architecture still matters in the age of digital art consumption.
3. The Broad
Eli and Edythe Broad's contemporary art museum houses one of the most significant postwar and contemporary collections in the world: Basquiat, Warhol, Koons, Kusama, Lichtenstein. General admission is free with timed-entry tickets. A Robert Therrien exhibition, featuring his signature oversized sculptural objects, runs through April 2026. The Broad is building a $100 million expansion by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, scheduled to open by 2028 in time for the Olympics.
4. MOCA
The Museum of Contemporary Art has the strongest post-1940 collection on the West Coast. Admission is free, funded by the Carolyn Clark Powers endowment since 2020. Two locations — Grand Avenue downtown and The Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo — offer different scales of exhibition. MOCA's programming tends toward the intellectually ambitious end of contemporary art.
5. Hammer Museum
UCLA's Hammer Museum is the scrappiest institution on this list and often the most interesting. Admission is free. The biennial "Made in L.A." exhibition has become the city's most important survey of emerging local artists. The Hammer punches above its weight by focusing on artists and ideas that other institutions aren't yet paying attention to.
6. The Huntington
Technically a library, art collection, and botanical garden in San Marino. The art galleries hold major European and American works — Gainsborough's "Blue Boy" being the most famous — but the 120 acres of themed gardens are the real draw. Admission runs $29 to $36 depending on the day. The Huntington is breaking ground on a $126.6 million expansion of its library and conservation spaces in spring 2026.
7. Norton Simon Museum
Pasadena's Norton Simon holds one of the finest private collections in the country, particularly strong in European Old Masters, Impressionists, and South and Southeast Asian sculpture. It's the kind of museum where you turn a corner and encounter a Rembrandt that would be the centerpiece of most other institutions. Admission is $15 for adults.
8. ICA LA
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles operates from a converted warehouse in the Arts District. Admission is free. The programming is consistently forward-thinking, and the space itself — raw concrete and high ceilings — lets ambitious installations breathe.
What's Coming Next
The next 18 months will reshape LA's cultural infrastructure. George Lucas's $1 billion Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens in Exposition Park in September 2026, designed by Ma Yansong. Dataland, artist Refik Anadol's museum of AI-created art, opens downtown — the first institution of its kind in the world. The La Brea Tar Pits are undergoing a $240 million renovation ahead of the Olympics.
For Tinsel's coverage of how the art market is evolving alongside these institutional changes, see our reporting on Frieze Los Angeles 2026 and the Whitney Biennial's pivot from outrage to quiet.
For more, see the Hayward Gallery’s installation art and material politics and Gestalten’s sauna book and wellness culture.
