Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the largest art museum in the American West and one of the most encyclopedic art institutions in the United States, with a collection of more than 150,000 works spanning 6,000 years of art history across every world culture and medium. Located on Wilshire Boulevard in Hancock Park, LACMA has been the anchor of Los Angeles's museum district since 1965 and continues to evolve through an ambitious expansion project designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor that will consolidate its multiple buildings into a single landmark structure spanning Wilshire Boulevard.

The collection's greatest strengths include outstanding holdings in European painting and sculpture from the medieval period through the 19th century; a significant collection of American art spanning the colonial period to the present; one of the finest collections of South and Southeast Asian art outside of Asia; exceptional Islamic art including major works from Persia, Turkey, and the Arab world; and a Latin American collection of particular relevance given Los Angeles's position as the city with the largest Mexican-American population in the United States. The film and photography collections reflect the city's identity as a center of image-making industries.

LACMA's connection to the broader Southwest art world is expressed through its California art holdings, including one of the finest collections of California Impressionism anywhere, and through exhibition programs that regularly address the art and culture of the US-Mexico border region. The Broad Contemporary Art Museum building, added to the campus in 2008, provides dedicated space for the museum's ambitious contemporary program, which includes major commissions, retrospectives, and thematic exhibitions of international significance. Urban Light, Chris Burden's installation of 202 restored antique street lamps at the museum's entrance, has become one of the most widely photographed public art works in Los Angeles, a fitting welcome to an institution that takes the relationship between art and public life seriously.