Los Angeles Is Building Toward 2028 With Stadiums, Museums and Public Art
Los Angeles is not waiting for the 2028 Olympics to begin reshaping itself. Across the city, major sports venues, transit projects, public art commissions and museum openings are converging into a single, unusually dense cultural moment.
The most visible symbol may be SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, which opened in 2020 and is described as the most expensive stadium in the world, with a cost of more than $6 billion in today’s money. Designed to handle crowds of up to 100,000, the venue will host eight Fifa World Cup matches this summer, including the United States’ opening group game and one quarter-final. Its role only expands from there: SoFi will stage the Super Bowl in 2027 and then co-host the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games in 2028 alongside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
But the city’s cultural infrastructure is changing just as quickly. On 8 May, three new Metro D Line stations will open, including Wilshire/Fairfax, which will bring riders directly to the edge of LACMA’s campus. The station will feature commissions by Los Angeles-based artists Karl Haendel, Ken Gonzales-Day and Susan Silton. Haendel’s mural, “Hands and Things,” turns objects borrowed from nearby museums into oversized emblems held aloft by giant hands. Gonzales-Day’s glass murals draw on LACMA’s collection, while Silton’s “WE, OUR, US” pairs quotations by Abraham Lincoln and Gloria Anzaldúa in English, Korean and Spanish. The other two stations, Wilshire/La Brea and Wilshire/La Cienega, will also carry site-specific works by Eamon Ore-Giron, Fran Siegel, Mark Dean Veca, Soo Kim and Todd Gray.
Farther south, Destination Crenshaw is taking shape along a 1.3-mile stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard. Founded by Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the project is billed as the largest Black public art project in the United States. Its long-term plan includes ten small parks, more than 800 trees and over 100 artworks, with commissions by Alison Saar, Melvin Edwards, Brenna Youngblood and Maren Hassinger. The boulevard and surrounding blocks are already marked by murals honoring the neighborhood’s history and residents.
Two museum projects are also set to alter the city’s cultural map. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, co-founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, opens on 22 September in Exposition Park and will house a permanent collection of more than 40,000 items. Dataland, described as the world’s first museum of AI arts, has not yet announced an opening date. And at the La Brea Tar Pits, a $240 million fundraising campaign is backing a renovation intended to be ready for the 2028 Olympics.
Taken together, these projects suggest a city preparing not for a single event, but for a sustained redefinition of how culture is experienced, moved through and displayed.
