LACMA Announces Collaboration with Qatar

Qatar Museums, Doha

LACMA and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, have announced plans to share exhibitions with the Qatar Museums, Doha. Just earlier this year, LACMA and Chinese-Indonesian collector Budi Tek signed a deal to form a joint foundation to operate the Shanghai museum housing Tek's collection and to collaborate on exhibitions.

Qatar Museums includes the Jean Nouvel-designed National Museum of Qatar, plus institutions devoted to Islamic art, modern art, and even Western-gaze Orientalist art of the 19th century.

The Qatar announcement follows a Christopher Knight piece on the ethical minefields of certain global collaborations. LACMA's long-term loan of its Islamic collection to the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture has been complicated by drone bombings and the bonesaw murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Meanwhile The Art Newspaper and ArtNews are reporting on the first LACMA-Yuz exhibitions. They will include the LACMA-organized Yoshitomo Nara exhibition, opening in Los Angeles (Apr. 5, 2020—Aug. 2, 2020) and traveling to Shanghai, the Guggenheim Bilbao, and an "as yet-unconfirmed institution in Rotterdam."

The Yuz Museum will be showing two exhibitions drawn from LACMA's collection: "In Production: Art and the Studio System" and "This Is Not a Selfie: Photographic Self-Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection," plus one from the Yuz collection, "The Abode of Illusions: The Garden of Zhang Daqian."