LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART (LACMA)

This is my electronic photo album on the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts (LACMA).  LACMA is the largest art museum in the Western United States. It attracts nearly a million visitors annually. Its holdings of more than 100,000 works span the history of art from ancient times to the present.

B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Garden

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was one of greatest, most prolific artists of all time. The irresistible appeal of the vibrant modelling, erotic subjects, and impassioned emotional energy of his sculptures accounts for the uncontested popularity of his work. In his own day he was continuously in the public eye, and his activities were debated constantly in the press.

Rodin had the first one-man retrospective exhibition in Paris (1900), and his fame spread quickly to the United States, where some of the most extensive collections of his sculptures were formed. The desire in the United States for his sculptures was phenomenal during his lifetime and remains so to this day. His work represents one of the largest concentrations of that of any artist in LACMA.

Urban Light Sculpture

Urban Light is a 2008 large-scale assemblage sculpture by Chris Burden that stands in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The installation consists of 202 restored street lamps from the 1920s and 1930s. Most of them once lit the streets of Southern California.

Since its 2008 installation, Urban Light has become a much photographed location, leading some observers to declare the work a Los Angeles icon.

Metropolis II

Chris Burden's Metropolis II is an intense kinetic sculpture, modeled after a fast paced, frenetic modern city. Steel beams form an eclectic grid interwoven with an elaborate system of 18 roadways, including one 6 lane freeway, and HO scale train tracks. Miniature cars speed through the city at 240 scale miles per hour; every hour, the equivalent of approximately 100,000 cars circulate through the dense network of buildings.

According to Burden, "The noise, the continuous flow of the trains, and the speeding toy cars, produces in the viewer the stress of living in a dynamic, active and bustling 21st Century city."

The La Brea Tar Pits (or Rancho La Brea Tar Pits) are a group of tar pits around which Hancock Park was formed, in urban Los Angeles.  Asphaltum or tar (brea in Spanish) has seeped up from the ground in this area for tens of thousands of years. The tar is often covered with dust, leaves, or water. Over many centuries, the bones of animals that were trapped in the tar were preserved. The George C. Page Museum is dedicated to researching the tar pits and displaying specimens from the animals that died there. The La Brea Tar Pits are a registered National Natural Landmarks.

Levitated Mass

Levitated Mass is a 2012 large-scale sculpture by Michael Heizer on the campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The installation consists of a 340-ton boulder affixed above a concrete trench through which visitors may walk. The nature, expense and scale of the installation made it an instant topic of discussion within the art world.

 The work comprises a 21.5-foot tall boulder mounted on the walls of a 456-long concrete trench, surrounded by 2.5 acres of compressed decomposed granite. The boulder is bolted to two shelves affixed to the inner walls of the trench, which descends from ground level to 15 feet below the stone at its center, allowing visitors to stand directly below the megalith

Thank you for visiting my photo blog. There are so many California tourist attractions, it’s hard to know where to begin. From Sea World-San Diego in the south to majestic Mt. Shasta near its northern border, California is without a doubt a vacationer’s paradise. I hope that my photos have given you a glimpse of the immense beauty and wonder of the Golden State.