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A Guide To LA Museums (As Told By A Non-Art Major) - Grayson Abele

I might just be the most artistically-illiterate person in the world, but that hasn’t stopped me from exploring various art museums around Los Angeles. With a whole new class of students coming this fall with perhaps no knowledge of LA’s museums, I thought it would be a good idea to give a brief overview of the ones I’ve had a chance to see so far.

The Getty Center Approximate Time Needed: 3-4 Hours

The Getty Center is a very historic art museum with around 3 buildings of rotating exhibits. That makes this a great introduction to LA. It’s a beautiful complex with a wonderful series of green spaces and a garden which makes simply walking outside just as amazing as the exhibits themselves. 

In terms of the exhibits, they rotate fairly often so be sure to check online if the ones on display are interesting to you. For example, I went because they had the largest display of Greek and Roman statues ever collected at the time and my friend is a very big fan of that. 

The Broad Approximate Time Needed: 3-4 Hours

The Broad (When said out loud it rhymes with “road”, which I didn’t realize until I actually got to the museum.) is a museum which is definitely approaching the title of “modern art museum.” But this means there aren’t quite as many classic paintings of random patrons throughout history, and more adventurous pieces like a room where several different recordings of different instruments are layered into a symphony. 

This is also where the room with a massive dinner table is set (pictures of which should be showing up on your Facebook feed fairly soon after getting to USC). I highly recommend checking out this museum because, like I said, it’s less appreciating painting styles and more just taking in the absolute craziness of some of the pieces. 

That being said, non-LA-natives may not know that The Broad is actually a free museum, but in order to get in you have to either show up in the morning around 6 AM to try and walk-in or you have to make reservations weeks if not months in advance. Be sure to see what time works with your schedule if this sounds interesting.

The Autry Approximate Time Needed: 2-3 Hours

This is the smallest museum that I’ve visited so far, and the one I visited most recently. This only has about an hour to 90 minutes of actual art pieces, and these are all from artists from the last decade or so, which is a nice change of pace from the other museums on this list. 

However, the second half of the museum is a history museum of the West. This means there is so much awesome memorabilia from throughout the West’s storied history as well as its depiction in Hollywood. So if you’ve ever wanted to see the actual Lone Ranger and Tonto outfits as well as costumes from basically every film in which people donned spurs and six-shooters this is absolutely worth your time to check out.

LACMA Approximate Time Needed: 5 Hours – Eternity

I mentioned for The Broad that you’ll probably be seeing quite a few pictures of the gigantic table set, but that pales in comparison to the number of pictures of the lampposts outside the LA County Museum of Art. It’s basically a law that every person in LA needs a picture in that iconic landscape, just a fair warning.

But that being said, beyond the lamps it is an amazing museum with a wide variety of art styles on display. It’s no small undertaking. My friends and I were there for around 5 hours, and we eventually had to skip the rest of the museum because there were still multiple exhibits to go and we were art-ed out. 

It’s a great museum for people of all levels of interest in art because a skin-deep walk through will give a wide variety of art styles and careful examination can take up to a day with just a few exhibits. There are also many large pieces like an entire automated city with toy cars and a massive rubber-band looking piece made out of wood. So yes, like every museum on this list I recommend going to LACMA but be sure to bring provisions for at least a few weeks if you find yourself getting lost in its halls.

So there you have it, my run-down of the museums in LA that I’ve had the pleasure of visiting. Even if you have no significant interest in the world of art, I still highly suggest checking out at least one of these museums because it’s a really fun way to be introduced to the amazing cultural center Los Angeles is, and in any case, a new Facebook profile picture ain’t bad.