History, Culture, and Place Ground LACMA’s Breathtaking New David Geffen Galleries

The new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art do not so much sit on Wilshire Boulevard as hover above it, a long, blobby concrete structure stretching across the street, held aloft by gargantuan, widely spaced cores. At ground level, the building feels almost improbably large, much of its underside shaded.

More than 20 years in the making, the new David Geffen Galleries opened with a ribbon-cutting on Sunday, ahead of a two-week preview period for members. (It opens to the public on May 4.) Designed by Peter Zumthor, a Pritzker Prize–winning Swiss architect known for his deeply atmospheric buildings, the project replaces much of LACMA’s mid-century campus with a single, winding strucutre. It is the brainchild of longtime director Michael Govan, who joined LACMA in 2006 and immediately set out to create a museum without hierarchy—one that places objects and artworks from across geographies and time periods into direct dialogue with one another. (The museum’s education center, restaurant, and museum shop all sit beneath the main structure’s span.)

Photo: Iwan Baan

Artist Mariana Castillo Deball was commissioned to create a work that meets visitors before they even reach the galleries. Her plaza installation is etched into the ground and unfurls across the concrete in pale, sand-toned expanses marked with native animal tracks and bits of Quetzalcoatl, the Mesoamerican feathered serpent drawn from murals at Mexico’s Teotihuacan archaeological complex. Threaded through the surface are fine, raked lines that recall the sand of a Zen garden.

Castillo Deball, who was born in Mexico City, has built a practice around fragments—of objects, archives, and histories that have been scattered and displaced over time—often using archaeology and museum collections to trace how meaning is constructed and carried forward. The Quetzalcoatl figure has long been understood as a union of earth and sky, a form that bridges worlds, and here that feels almost literal. The building rises above the artwork, suspended and expansive, while the plaza remains grounded, in acknowledgment of the creatures that once roamed LA’s land.

“I thought it was a metaphor of what a museum is—that museums are made out of fragments,” says Castillo Deball. “And the first time I spoke with Michael, he explained to me that he saw this museum as an archipelago. You don’t have continents like you used to have in museums.”

In a border state where migration and cultural exchange are foundational—and immigration enforcement poses a constant threat—Castillo Deball’s work also makes that reality visible, embedding the labor of migrant workers directly into the surface of the museum.