LACMA was founded in 1961, when the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art split into separate institutions and the art collection moved to a new facility on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile district. The collection now holds more than 150,000 works spanning approximately 6,000 years of human art-making — Egyptian antiquities, pre-Columbian objects, South Asian sculpture, European old masters, Japanese prints, American modernism, and contemporary work from across the world.

By collection size and geographic breadth, LACMA is the largest art museum west of Chicago. It draws approximately 1.5 million visitors annually, making it one of the most visited museums in the United States. The campus occupies a roughly 20-acre site that has expanded through multiple building campaigns since the original 1961 opening.

LACMA's campus grew organically over six decades, adding structures as the collection expanded and the institution's ambitions outpaced its original facilities. The result was a campus of disparate buildings from different eras, connected in ways that had become functionally awkward and architecturally incoherent.

In 2020, four of those buildings — the Hammer Building, the Ahmanson Building, the Art of the Americas Building, and the Leo S. Bing Center — were demolished to make way for a new building. The demolitions were not without controversy. Critics argued that the older buildings had their own architectural merit and that the scale of demolition was unnecessary. Supporters contended that the campus needed a coherent replacement rather than continued piecemeal expansion.

The new structure being built to replace the demolished pavilions is designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2009 and is known for a body of work characterized by intense material specificity and atmospheric precision. His design for LACMA is an undulating, single-story building raised on pillars above Wilshire Boulevard — spanning the street — with a footprint that Zumthor has described as being inspired by the shape of the Los Angeles River.

The project's timeline was extended multiple times and its cost grew substantially from original estimates. The David Geffen Galleries opened on April 19, 2026, replacing the demolished structures with a single unified building that the museum's leadership argues finally gives LACMA the kind of architectural identity that it has lacked compared to peer institutions.

LACMA's location on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile district places it in one of Los Angeles's most culturally dense corridors. The La Brea Tar Pits — active fossil excavation sites in the middle of the city — are immediately adjacent. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened nearby in 2021. The Peterson Automotive Museum sits a few blocks east. The Museum Row designation along this stretch of Wilshire is, by the standards of Los Angeles, genuinely walkable.

Urban Light, the lamp installation at the Wilshire Boulevard entrance, continues to operate regardless of the construction activity behind it. On weekend evenings, people photograph themselves among the lamps from mid-afternoon until well after dark — a ritual that has become so embedded in the city's visual culture that it has generated parodies, homages, and eventually its own folklore about what it means to have your picture taken there.