Los Angeles has cemented his status as global artificial capital over the past two decades, with the arrival of various new museums, not to mention the long -awaited expansion of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In Also to be seen: unique and unexpected museums of Greater Los Angeles (2024), Todd Lerew argues that the cultural power of the region is not alone In these high -profile cultural institutions, but also in our local, unusual and often under recognized museums. Indeed, according to Lerew’s count, Greater La has more than 750 museums (on which the author has described Everymuseum.la), more than any other American city and on the same footing with artificial hubs such as London and Paris. While he writes in the attacker of the book: “The commercial art market and the presence and activities of regular museums can often be interpreted as wider in the pre -culture.”
Lerew defines Museums Expansive and the 64 institutions that he finds profiles in secondary schools, restaurants, state parks, a tattoo salon and, in real LA -fashion, comic centers. He also has an extensive image of Los Angeles himself, including La, Orange and Riverside provinces, as well as parts of the inland rich.
There is a fair dose of obstinacy here, but the book is the most impactful when drawing attention in the ways in which museums increase The stories of communities that have traditionally been excluded from regular cultural institutions, despite the rich diasporic material of the region. For example, the Ararat-Eskian Museum has been celebrating Armenian-American culture from the location in a senior care facility for a quarter of a century. Founded in 1985 By Luther Eskijian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, the interests of André “Darvish” Sevrugian and Jirrugian and Jirayr Zorthian, the artist whose famous Ranch was almost completely destroyed in the recent Eaton Fire, and a memorial with bones. In the meantime, the Mobile Afro -Arman miniature museum is showing the work of Karen Collins, who has made around 50 shadow boxes Showing scenes of the black life and history, including Martin Luther King Jr. Preaching, The Black Lives Matter protests from 2020 and Kendrick Lamar.
Lerew also visits other organizations that focus on the physical environment of the region, including the Valley Relics Museum, a pop culture wonderland of neon boards and Efemera that fills two hangars at Van Nys airport; The Street Light Museum, with some of the more than four hundred different lamp designs that illuminate the streets of the city; And the Southern California Railway Museum, which houses the largest existing collection of Pacific Electric Red Car Trolleys, “The world’s largest electric railway transition system in the 1920s” that spread over LA before the rise of the car. It was in particular Henry Huntington – whose former home and art collection is the core of the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens – who owned LA’s tram system, just one of the various connecting threads between cultural institutions in the city.
As much as they describe communities and places, many of these museums reflect the obsessions and often eccentricities of individuals who have helped shape the cultural landscape of LA. Some of these are as time capsules that have been stored in Amber, while others have been updated and transformed over the years, which reflects several identities. These vary from El Alisal, the castle-like former residence of journalist and ethnographer Charles Lummis, to the Ojai house of “Mama of Dada” Beatrice Wood and the Echo Park Parsonage of Legendary Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.
The compendium includes contemporary examples that can be considered living works of art itself, such as the Velaslavasay Panorama, a converted theater founded by Sara Velas that re-relates the 19th-century moving Panorama Artform with a large painting in the round augmented by sculptural elements, sound and lights. The Museum of Jurassic Technology is the brainchild of Macarthur “Genius Grant” winner David Wilson, who founded the awesome, labyrinthian cabinet of Curiosa in the early 1980s. Made with flawless craftsmanship, the exhibitions mix fact and fiction, science and art, and reveal so much about museology and the history of the display as they do on their individual topics, from medieval bestiaria to Russian room dogs to Islamic design in medieval Spain.
Lerew, however, calls ‘the most unique and undervalued museum in South California’, as the Antelope Valley Indian Museum State Historic Park, which confronts its own controversial history of collecting. The museum started with indigenous artifacts collected by artist Howard Arden Edwards in the early 20th century through looting That means all too often at the time, such as severe robbery. However, the museum recently started reconsidering how this inheritance can be tackled. In 2023, It began to repatriate objects to the
San Nicolas, San Miguel and San Clemente Islands, with plans to consult with local tribes about creating new exhibitions.
In an era in which almost identical art fairs bounce from continent to continent, and cities try to surpass their neighbors with art repositories designed with Starchitect, Can also be seen Gives a plea for the hyper-room as a crucial element of a robust cultural ecosystem-not in an oppositional relationship with these larger institutions, but in a symbiotic. “These objects would not be logical under the same roof, could not get equal attention by an institution,” writes Lerew, “and where possible are better off, where they come from the place of the people they represent directly.”
Also to be seen: unique and unexpected museums of Greater Los Angeles (2024) By Todd Lerew with photography by Ryan Schude is published by Angel City Press in the Los Angeles Public Library and is available online and through independent booksellers.
