From all of us at LACMA, we wish you a joyous and restorative end of the year. As 2025 comes to a close, we’re sharing some of our most memorable stories as we look back on our exhibitions and programs from the past year.
As a reminder, the museum will be open on New Year's Day, Thursday, January 1, so you can start your 2026 with art and creative inspiration. Book your tickets in advance online to explore everything we have on view.
Installing Octavia’s Gaze with Todd Gray
Go behind-the-scenes in the David Geffen Galleries and gain insight into the ideas behind Gray’s remarkable new artwork that invites viewers to rethink art history.
50 Works 50 Weeks: Thomas Eakins’s Wrestlers
As LACMA prepares for the 2026 public opening of the David Geffen Galleries, we launched 50 Works 50 Weeks to share 50 iconic artworks that will be returning in the building. Learn more about Eakins’s icon of American art and keep up with the ongoing series.
Planting Jeff Koons’s Split-Rocker
Learn about the planting of Koons’s Split-Rocker, the 37-foot-tall sculpture adorned with 45,000 flowering plants that anchors the public art program spaces of the David Geffen Galleries.
Artists Represent Themselves: Sammy Baloji on Mémoire
Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics examined nearly a quarter century of production by Black artists. Along with Baloji, curator Dhyandra Lawson asked Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Frida Orupabo, and Widline Cadet to respond to questions about their work in the exhibition.
An Appreciation: Frank O. Gehry (1929–2025)
Stephanie Barron, senior curator and department head, Modern Art, and close friend of Frank Gehry, paid tribute to the life and legacy of the Canadian-American architect.
“The texture of technology”: Q&A with Artist April Greiman
Among the foundational figures whose contributions were on view in Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography and Film, Greiman helped to define the computer aesthetic in design in the 1980s and has continued to embrace new technologies in her explorations of space and color.
For Immediate Release: Bringing LACMA’s Historical Press Releases Online
Dive into LACMA’s archives with this collection of newly digitized press releases spanning from 1951 to 1993 that reveal the voice of a museum continually defining itself and shaping its own identity.
Before You Now: Kalli Arte Collective
To accompany Before You Now: Capturing the Self in Portraiture, which focused on the enduring theme of the artist’s self-portrait, LACMA produced a series of video portraits introducing just a few of the artists and their works, including Kalli Arte Collective, Stephanie Syjuco, Jessica Wimbley, and Lili Lakich.
“What does it take to feel autonomy these days?”: Lauren Lee McCarthy on Auto
Take a ride with McCarthy’s latest interactive performance, Auto. In this interview, the artist discusses the ideas behind the project and the questions it raises about human-machine relationships.
A Work That Doesn’t Arrive—It’s Made
In February, LACMA acquired a vintage, early 1970s wire piece by the post-minimalist artist Richard Tuttle. In this article, learn how the site-specific piece was installed onsite and how, for the first time in his decades-long career, the artist wasn’t the one making it.
Chris Burden’s Urban Light Is Getting a Refresh
After nearly 10 years since it was last restored, this Los Angeles landmark was restored and re-painted this year.