This gallery presents work by a number of artists, mostly European, representing the avant-garde of the 1920s and beyond. They are associated with several different artistic movements: Surrealism, Dada, and De Stijl. What they have in common is a shared sensibility: subversion or total rejection of the bourgeois culture that some believed led Europe into the horrors of World War I.

Chris Burden’s Metropolis II is an intense, kinetic sculpture—Burden has called it a “performative sculpture”—modeled after a fast paced, frenetic modern city. Steel beams form an eclectic grid interwoven with an elaborate system of 18 roadways, including one six lane freeway, and HO scale train tracks. Miniature cars speed through the city at 240 scale miles per hour.
According to Burden, “The noise, the continuous flow of the trains, and the speeding toy cars produces in the viewer the stress of living in a dynamic, active 21st century city."

This sculpture embraces the paradox of being a massive volume that is also extremely light. The work is made with unsophisticated commercial materials, yet it looks fragile and intimate; there is a stark contrast between the material and the delicacy of the finished piece. You might think of it as a drawing in space: line is the predominant element. The title, Columna, refers to a basic building element—a column—suggesting the artist’s interest in architecture and space.

The Broad Contemporary Art Museum was built by Italian architect Renzo Piano. He says part of what he enjoyed about the project was the central location of the site.
“It’s in the middle of the city, it's unpretentious, it’s open, it’s generous. You don’t have to travel far away to go there. You fall in LACMA easily – it’s part of the grid of the city.

Here you will see a rotating collection of contemporary Japanese ceramics. Drawing from the rich tradition of Japanese ceramics, contemporary Japanese artists are reinterpreting ancient traditions, bringing new visions to old forms, and pushing technical, aesthetic and conceptual boundaries.
To hear LACMA curator Hollis Goodall talk about this dynamic and growing collection, press the play button below.

The East Wing of the Pavilion of Japanese Art was specially designed to display Japanese painting, including both scrolls and folding screens. 
A hanging scroll is a painting done on paper or silk, backed with thick paper and surrounded by silk borders.  At the bottom is a wooden dowel that allows the scroll to be easily rolled up and stored in a box. Here, scrolls are hung in niches to mimic the recessed alcove, or tokonoma, found in traditional Japanese homes.

This gallery highlights LACMA’s collection of Japanese woodblock prints produced from the 17th century through the 20th century.

The Pavilion for Japanese Art, built in the 1980s, was designed especially to exhibit and view Japanese art. The exterior walls of the pavilion are made of Kalwall, a translucent material that allows light to enter the gallery in much the same way that shoji screens work; this modulates the outdoor light’s effects according to the time of day, the season of the year, and the brightness due to weather.

All of the objects in this gallery come from the region known as Mesoamerica: the diverse geographic and cultural regions that comprise much of Mexico, as well as modern-day Guatemala, Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. Look for Mayan and Aztec ceramics, vessels and sculpted figures from throughout the region.

In this gallery, you see evidence of the elaborate systems of trade that developed in ancient Mesoamerica and the Andes. Look for jewelry made from jade, gold, and copper. Trade led to new achievements in the arts, as materials and influences moved from one region to another. Long-distance maritime trade routes ran from southern Peru all the way to the western shores of what is now Mexico.