LACMA Reimagines Its Collection Around Oceans, Seas, and Circulation
At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the new David Geffen Galleries are doing more than housing the permanent collection. They are reorganizing it around water — a curatorial framework that links objects, ideas, and histories across the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans.
The shift reflects a broader effort at LACMA to move beyond the museum’s traditional departmental divisions. Under chief executive and director Michael Govan, curators had already tested cross-category displays that placed contemporary photography beside ancient textiles or Latin American sculpture beside South Asian design. The new building, with its curving architecture and open sightlines, gives that experiment a permanent form.
Britt Salvesen, who heads photography and prints and drawings, said the museum had seen the “values and gains” of breaking down silos. Leah Lehmbeck, who oversees European painting and sculpture and American art, described the approach as “enlivening,” arguing that artists have always worked in relation to the world around them rather than in isolation.
The result is a collection installation that treats water as both subject and structure. The galleries use oceans and seas as conduits for thinking about movement, exchange, and contact — a way of showing how artworks have traveled, been transformed, and acquired new meanings over time.
Among the anchor works is Todd Gray’s “Octavia’s Gaze” (2025), a 27-foot-long commission installed at one of the new entrances. The Los Angeles-born artist’s layered composition brings together portraits, landscapes, museum interiors, and architectural fragments, including an image of Pasadena-born writer Octavia Butler. Printed with UV-cured aluminum technology, the work faces Wilshire Boulevard and sets the tone for the galleries’ emphasis on overlap rather than isolation.
Nearby, Reiko Sudō’s chrome curtains function as both protection and artwork, filtering light for more sensitive objects while reinforcing the exhibition design’s attention to transparency and surface. The curtains will also appear in Sudō’s retrospective at LACMA this autumn.
Other works sharpen the water-based framework. The rare Kashmir Map Shawl from the second half of the 19th century charts Srinagar under Mughal rule with remarkable precision, while Ruth Asawa’s “Untitled” (1954) appears in a Pacific Ocean-inspired gallery shaped by light and shadow. El Anatsui’s “Fading Scroll” extends the conversation further, underscoring how material, geography, and history can be read together rather than apart.
LACMA’s new installation suggests a museum less interested in fixed categories than in the routes that connect them. In that sense, the galleries do not simply display the collection; they make circulation visible.
