Since 1986, LACMA’s annual Collectors Committee Gala has resulted in numerous important acquisitions in all areas of the museum’s collection. This weekend the Collectors Committee added nine more. For the event, Collectors Committee members create a pool for acquisitions funds and then use those funds to vote for artworks presented by LACMA curators earlier in the day. In the final tally, LACMA raised more than $3.2 million—a record for the event—toward seven artworks. On top of that, Collectors Committee sponsor JPMorgan made a gift of two more works from the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection: a photograph by Robert Frank, St. Francis and Gas Station, and City Hall—Los Angeles, from his iconic series The Americans; and a portfolio of seventy-five mixed-media works on paper made by Ed Ruscha in 1969, Stains.
With 100,000 objects dating from ancient times to the present, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is the largest art museum in the western United States. A museum of international stature as well as a vital part of Southern California, LACMA shares its vast collections through exhibitions, public programs, and research facilities that attract nearly a million visitors annually.
LACMA’s seven-building complex is located on twenty acres in the heart of Los Angeles, halfway between the ocean and downtown. The campus is undergoing a ten-year expansion and renovation known as the Transformation and designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop.
LACMA’s collections encompass the geographic world and virtually the entire history of art. Among the museum’s special strengths are its holdings of Asian art, housed in part in the Bruce Goff-designed Pavilion for Japanese Art; Latin American art, ranging from pre-Columbian masterpieces to works by leading modern and contemporary artists including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and José Clemente Orozco; and Islamic art, of which LACMA hosts one of the most significant collections in the world. www.lacma.org