Wandering the David Geffen Galleries at LACMA

If you have a chance to visit Los Angeles this Fall, don’t miss the newly opened Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. You will see and experience a truly new vision of what a museum can be. 

The art is curated into four large interconnected areas, organized across time and origin into  a global context: art of the Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Mediterranean Sea, and Atlantic Ocean. While each gallery is full of ideas, the visitor’s experience is not intellectual but visceral, and feels light. You can ignore the daily docent tours and trust your own eyes as you discover remarkable visual connections among disparate works of art.  

For example, in an area titled “Japan: Living Landscapes, Flowing Waters,” June Wayne’s 1972 lithograph (pictured above)  is shown in the context of Japanese and Korean kimonos, woodblock prints, and screens from centuries before. Each work illuminates the others.  

Around the corner, in “Blue and White Porcelain of East Asia,” another set of remarkable visual connections is made. The Japanese avante garde ceramicist Harumi Nakashima’s abstract sculpture sits next to traditional blue and white porcelain jars from the Hung and Josean Dynasties.  

These visual connections  have a powerful impact on the viewer, because you see them before you understand what you’re seeing. You slow down, you look, you pay attention, and then you understand. You are an active participant rather than a respectful observer. You are delighted by your own discoveries.  

The Geffen Galleries are accessible in every sense of the word. The museum is free to LA county residents, and reasonably priced for others. The guidebook is small, 4 x 6 inches, thick with images and easily packable, and costs $15. 

Happily, the guidebook is titled “Wander.”