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Learning in La La Land? Seriously, we’re not class clowning. With new museums, educational exhibitions, and erudite events popping up across the city, a brainier Tinseltown hopes to teach you and your family a thing or two about the arts and sciences.
The latest arrival is Dataland, a k a the Museum of AI Arts, located downtown at the Grand L.A., the Frank Gehry–designed complex across from the Walt Disney Concert Hall. It claims to be the world’s first museum of AI arts and should be open this spring (after delaying its planned 2025 launch).
Created by Turkish, Los Angeles-based designer and artist Refik Anadol — who caused a stir with his big-screen lobby installation “Unsupervised” at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art — the space aims to ask some pretty big questions.
What’s the relationship between human creativity and machine intelligence? Can the physical and the virtual intersect? What does it look like when you smash art, technology and data together on floor-to-ceiling screens? Do androids dream of electric sheep?
“One of my inspirations has been that question: what can a machine do with someone else’s memories?” the artist said in a 2024 interview, noting that his work is inspired by the film “Blade Runner.”
One installation is adapted from one of Anadol’s first pieces, a so-called “Infinity Room” he dreamed up in 2015 at UCLA (where he teaches in the Department of Design Media Arts).
This new and improved Infinity Room with its immersive projections features AI-generated scents from the studio’s Large Nature Model — a large language model fed on a diet of audio, visual, and environmental data from 16 rainforests around the planet. And that’s just one of five galleries in the sprawling 25,000-square-foot space.
For something old school with a fun new twist, haul your horde to the Natural History Museum. In 2024, it got a radical $75 million redo — more chad-ifying leg-lengthening surgery than facelift. Now, the museum can stand tall with a new 60,000-square-foot, indoor-outdoor wing designed by Los Angeles’ Frederick Fisher & Partners and Mia Lehrer’s Studio-MLA, inviting Exposition Park locals to come explore.
You won’t want to miss Gnatalie, a more than 75-foot-long, green-boned dinosaur, newly on display. It’s the only one of its kind to be discovered. You, a Millennial raised on the “Land Before Time,” might call it a “long neck,” but your 6-year-old will know it’s a sauropod.
At the same time, the museum put Barbara Carrasco’s monumental 1981 mural, “L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective,” up for all to see. The work, created for the city’s bicentennial, was censored at the time due to its depictions of low points in LA history — like the 1871 Chinese massacre, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the Zoot Suit Riots, and so on. We’re grown up enough to take the heat these days.
Spend the afternoon taking in the museum’s collection of 35 million objects and artifacts. Exhibitions on now include “Reframing Dioramas: The Art of Preserving Wilderness,” which celebrates the 100th anniversary of the museum’s vast diorama halls, including the opening of a hall that had been closed for decades.
Another old-school city icon is also flaunting fresh fun.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is opening the David Geffen Galleries on May 4. Spanning Wilshire Boulevard, between the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and the La Brea Tar Pits, the exhibition space is the new home for the museum’s permanent collection, founded in 1965.
The undulating, multi-level, curtain-glass facade houses around 3,000 objects, with collections of Asian, Latin American, and Islamic art. The 110,000-square-foot gallery was designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor.
But if it’s spaceship architecture you seek, patiently you wait. After years of delays, the $1 billion Lucas Museum of Narrative Art finally has an opening date for its futuristic, 300,000-square-foot home next to the Natural History Museum in Exhibition Park.
George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, will open the museum dedicated to visual storytelling Sept. 22 — and it’s going to be the most exciting cultural institution going in LA when it does.
“This is a museum of the people’s art — the images are illustrations of beliefs we live with every day. For that reason, this art belongs to everyone,” Hobson said in a press release. “Our hope is that as people move through the galleries, they will see themselves, and their humanity, reflected back.”
Lucas has spent decades amassing more than 40,000 illustrated artworks by the likes of Frank Frazetta, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and Jack Kirby, as well as pieces by masters like Maxfield Parrish, Norman Rockwell, and Frida Kahlo.
It was costly: Robert Colescott’s “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an American History Textbook” set him back $15.3 million alone.
Spread over 35 galleries, you’ll see everything from antiquities to alternative comix (and of course artifacts from “Star Wars”).
Designed by architect Ma Yansong — of the Chinese firm MAD Architects — the sweeping sinuous structure sits in an 11-acre garden. It will also house a library, studios, theaters, a restaurant, cafe and an event space.
“Stories are mythology,” Lucas said, “and when illustrated, they help humans understand the mysteries of life.”
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