As LACMA prepares for the 2026 public opening of the new David Geffen Galleries, the future home of the museum’s permanent collection spanning a breadth of eras and cultures, we’re sharing 50 iconic artworks that will be on view in the building over the next 50 weeks in the series 50 Works 50 Weeks.
Forming the expansive floor of the plaza level of the David Geffen Galleries, Castillo Deball’s monumental Feathered Changes emanates from the architecture in undulating paths of warm concrete that mimic lines raked into sand. Visitors who move across and along the pavement’s meditative striations encounter the footprints of other beings—coyotes, bears, racoons, roadrunners—who have long traversed this landscape.
Another creature, so gargantuan his full form cannot be beheld at once, emerges in fragments across this work: it is the great Feathered Serpent of the cosmopolitan Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan, the details of his plumed body impressed into islands of black concrete. Castillo Deball derives this image from Teotihuacan’s ancient murals, now dispersed in museum collections around the globe. By perambulating the plaza, the visitor participates in the reunification and reincorporation of the Feathered Serpent, a democratic process encouraged in this and other walkable artworks by the artist (like Vista de Ojos, in LACMA’s collection). Through this ancient presence, Feathered Changes is a cantilever for the lofty gallery of world art and culture overhead, grounding all who stand atop it—art, architecture, and human alike—in the deep history of this land and its Indigenous peoples, its first artmakers.