Las Vegas Calls Dibs on LACMA Art
In 2024 Elaine Wynn and Michael Govan announced a plan for LACMA to lend its art and curatorial expertise to the upcoming Las Vegas Museum of Art. The deal drew glowing praise in Las Vegas and skepticism in L.A. ("As bad art museum ideas go, this one is right up there," wrote Christopher Knight.) Anyone who's been to kindergarten knows it's good to share, but critics felt that the arrangement was excessive in scope and unusually one-sided. The Las Vegas museum is not a collecting institution and has nothing to lend back.
A few details are now coming into focus. The Las Vegas Museum of Art (LVMA) will open its initial space, the Grand Central Galleries, with an Impressionism show drawn from LACMA's collection. Set to open in April 2027, "A Shared Light: Monet, Impressionism, and the American Landscape" will include nearly 60 works by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Pissarro, Sisley, Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, and others. LACMA's Shannon Vittoria and David Bardeen curate.
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| Installation view, "Collecting Impressionism at LACMA," in the Resnick Pavilion |
It's surely no coincidence that the Las Vegas show opens a few months after the close of the current LACMA exhibition "Collecting Impressionism at LACMA" (in the Resnick Pavilion through Jan. 2, 2027). It sounds like the LVMA show will have considerable overlap with "Collecting Impressionism."
Typical loan exhibitions run a few months. But the press release does not give a closing date for "A Shared Light." "Collecting Impressionism" is scheduled to run over a year.
The LVMA website's splash page now contains a scrolling carousel of works from the LACMA collection. It shows star pieces such as Picasso's Weeping Woman; Matisse's Gerbe; the museum's only Frida Kahlo; and Maruyama Okyo's Cranes. The website does not offer any explanation, but a reasonable viewer might conclude that these works are going to be lent to the Las Vegas museum.
All the displayed works, save Okyo's light-sensitive screen painting, are currently on view in BCAM or the Geffen Galleries. The Matisse ceramic mural is bolted to Geffen concrete and would be a challenge to move.
The carousel also shows an installation view of "Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico," a 2010 LACMA exhibition. This suggests that LACMA-organized loan exhibitions may also be coming to Las Vegas.
LVMA's 15,000-sf Grand Central Galleries is by the Las Vegas firm LGA Architecture. It will remain in operation after starchitect Francis Kéré's 60,000-sf main building opens in 2029. The Kéré structure will have three exhibition spaces. That could mean up to four simultaneous exhibitions being programmed from the LACMA collection in perpetuity. The press materials don't break out how much of the square footage is exhibition space, but the two LVMA buildings come to 75,000 sf total, versus 110,000 sf for the gallery floor of LACMA's Geffen Galleries. It's a lot of space to program from one museum's collection.
One of LVMA supporters' talking points is that Las Vegas is the largest U.S. city without an art museum. If you believe that's an inequity to be remedied, why should the burden fall exclusively on LACMA? Don't New York, Washington, and Chicago care about art-starved Las Vegas?
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| Rendering of Francis Kéré's Las Vegas Museum of Art. The door is flanked by Hans Hofmann's Flight and Joan Mitchell's East Ninth Street, both from the LACMA collection |
Comments
I was in Nashville a few years ago and stayed across the street from the museum there; the exhibition was of Latin American Masterpieces from LACMA’s collection. It seems that LACMA is already sharing its collection, probably for some kind of payment. Great museums tend to do this and I don’t see why LACMA should be excluded.
Absolutely.
> fall exclusively on
> LACMA?
If they were a better-run institution with a great collection and money galore, they perhaps could handle it. But they're not.
I don't trust Govan and his staffers to deal with the museum's collections in a very astute, professional manner for just one location, much less two or three.
To me they're already sort of burned out in handling the Geffen Galleries alone. So their now also having to juggle a place hundreds of miles away in the hot desert (where gambling and live entertainment are king, far above that of so-called arts and culture) is really tempting fate or asking for trouble.
No.
Some visitors are not browsers. We are art historians (of a sort) intent on studying important pictures that simple irresponsibility on LACMA's part denies us.
I'm not flying 6 hours to deal with 100% craycray.
Lending pieces from storage is one thing. Sending out the heart of the collection, work many of us hadn't seen for seven years while the new building went up, is another. I always visit the Impressionism and Modern galleries, and as a museum supporter I don't want to see that work in Vegas. I'm pretty sure the people of LA who support this museum won't be happy about it either.
If the New York crowd wants to help a new museum get started, they can ask the Met and MoMA. Their storerooms are full of masterpieces compared to what LACMA has on display.
> of masterpieces compared
> to what LACMA has on
> display.
Exactly.
As for LACMA, a few months ago I was scrolling through its online collection. I wondered how many "why the hell isn't that on display?!" objects there would be. Although some crucial works aren't in the Geffen, Broad or Resnick, much less the still-closed Japanese/Price/Goff Pavilion, I didn't come across as many stand-out items as I hoped there would be.
But there are still enough works in storage worth installing that all the areas throughout the Geffen that are blank gray concrete walls or open gray concrete floors are inexcusable. I won't even include the live-performance area set aside for skateboarders and bicycle riders. Or certain artworks that are spaced way too wide apart.
Michael Govan and his various staffers are less professional or sophisticated than they should be. But that's assuming LA of 2026 isn't the LA of 1965. And if they now have to spend their time on and allocate parts of LACMA's collection to the building in Las Vegas, good luck with that.
Or, you can give those masterpieces to another museum because something about this conversation and the public thinking they have a say in the disposition of your property bothers you. That's what I have decided.
--- J. Garcin
Maybe. But it might just be the usual inbred backscratching. The directors of LACMA and the Las Vegas Museum are both trustees of Michael Heizer's Triple-Aught Foundation, whose land art, "The City," is administered by the Vegas Museum director. Heizer designed the sculptural pedestals for the 2010 Olmec exhibition at LACMA, featured on the carousel.