My Visit to LACMA

On my first full day in Los Angeles, after spending the early morning at the beach, I headed up to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and really lucked out: not only were all of the main galleries open (there are about seven of them, and on past visits I was only able to get into a couple of them, not including the European and Americas collections), but it was a free admission day which onlu happens once a month. I expected to spend a couple of hours but was there for almost five, trying to make sure I got a look at all the good stuff therein.
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I'll probably be posting pictures from this visit over several posts, and these first few are meant more to set the scene than to concentrate on particular pieces I saw there. As mentioned above, there are a number of galleries, each devoted to a different geographic region (above is the really cool Latin American displys, which reside among the weirdly undulating "walls" seen above. In fact, I found the design of these galleries more compelling than the pieces on display there.

Here's a view from the balcony in the Americas Building, looking northwest towards Fairfax Avenue (one of the main commercial streets in West L.A.) with the Santa Monica Mountains in the background (I think-- I'm not sure where they end and the Hollywood Hills begin). You know, I just can't get enough of those palm trees, which are really striking in the sunlight, and add an exotic look to just about everything.

All of the galleries I visited on my trip have a very liberal policy on taking photos, so I went a little hog wild, snapping pictures of everything. I especially tried to get some good shots of the spaces and how the exhibits are set up, and how the visitors kind of fit in, as above. I believe the box in the foreground was in the near east exhibit, but I mainly liked the image of the silhouetted figure in the background.

This one is kind of similar, with the single figure kind of dwarfed by the giant modernistic paintings. The ball seen in the background is actually the cueball in a gigantic set of billiard balls.

Here's one for my brother-in-law Tom: it's a Jeff Koons sculpture comprising six Hoover shampoo polishers and a Shelton Wet/Dry Vacuum. It took him six years (according to the accompanying card) to construct this particular piece. More pics from the LACMA tomorrow...