Get ready to celebrate a new chapter at LACMA on Sunday, May 3, at a free, fun-filled day for NexGenLA members and their families. You’ll be among the first to visit the museum’s new home for the permanent collection: the David Geffen Galleries! Come gather with your community, explore a groundbreaking new building, and experience the future of the museum.
Throughout the day from 10 am–2 pm, families can drop in for hands-on art-making, face painting, and interactive experiences outside the building. Or, step inside the Boone Children’s Gallery in the new K.M. Keck Education Center, join Andell Family Sundays art workshops, create with the Maya Mobile workshop, or capture the moment with family portraits by Las Fotos Project. Outdoor tours offer a look at artworks across campus, while a lively lineup of performances—from TAIKOPROJECT, CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, and KCRW DJ Novena Carmel—will keep you moving.
All outdoor activities are free to attend without museum admission, while indoor access to the David Geffen Galleries is only for members of NexGenLA, LACMA’s free youth membership for kids and teens 17 and under who live in L.A. County, offering free museum admission and access year-round. Find more info about the NexGenLA Celebration and reserve your free timed-entry tickets for May 3 in advance to join the fun. Parking is limited, so consider taking Metro or rideshare for an easy arrival.
In the meantime, you can also make your own special postcard at home before the Andell Family Sundays workshop happening at the celebration, where we will be making a Matisse-inspired collage postcard that you can really send in the mail. Can’t make it on May 3? Come visit Andell Family Sundays on May 17, 24, or 31, from 12:30–3:30 pm, for the same activity!
For this activity, we’re inspired by Henri Matisse’s La Gerbe (pronounced lah jair-buh), which is French for “sheaf,” as in stalks of wheat or a spray of flowers. Matisse was asked by a Los Angeles couple to make a ceramic mural for their home. The artist started the project by making cut-out shapes on colorful painted paper, and then arranged them into a collage. The design was later made into a ceramic mural and was installed at a home here in L.A. before they gave it to LACMA, where it is now on view in the David Geffen Galleries.
Step 1: To make your own collage, start by collecting some art materials: heavy paper cut to 4” × 6” or an index card, white or colored paper to draw on, scissors, a glue stick, and drawing supplies like pencils, erasers, markers, pastels, colored pencils or paint sticks. Work with what you’ve got!
Step 2: Create your design by drawing shapes or letters on drawing paper.
Step 3: Color your shapes in. You don’t have to stay in the lines.
Step 4: Cut your shapes out. Or try what Matisse did and “draw” with your scissors. That means cut out shapes by letting your scissors flow across the paper without drawing your ideas out first. Be careful, and watch your fingers!
Step 5: Arrange your shapes on the postcard. Now re-arrange them to see how a different design looks. Try layering shapes one on top of another. Take some away. Make new ones to add. Get your collage exactly the way you want it to look!
Step 6: Glue your shapes down. Let everything dry and decide if you are going to send your postcard in the mail or hang it up and live with it in your home.
