We’re gearing up for Arts Week right after spring break so we thought we’d recap on the two museums our visual arts students recently visited –  Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Broad.

“Since its inception in 1965, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has been devoted to collecting works of art that span both history and geography, in addition to representing Los Angeles’s uniquely diverse population. Today LACMA is the largest art museum in the western United States, with a collection that includes nearly 130,000 objects dating from antiquity to the present, encompassing the geographic world and nearly the entire history of art. Among the museum’s strengths are its holdings of Asian art, Latin American art, ranging from pre-Columbian masterpieces to works by leading modern and contemporary artists; and Islamic art, of which LACMA hosts one of the most significant collections in the world. A museum of international stature as well as a vital part of Southern California, LACMA shares its vast collections through exhibitions, public programs, and research facilities that attract over a million visitors annually, in addition to serving millions through digital initiatives, such as online collections, scholarly catalogues, and interactive engagement at lacma.org.” – lacma.org

One of LACMA’s public programs are school tours.  The tour we went on was about the Art of Many Cultures. On this tour, students discovered and compared art from many different cultures (Western and non-Western), identifying the unique qualities that relate a work of art to the historical time period and place of its origin.  Students also learned how culture and art influences each other.  We saw examples of Hindu, African, Pre-Colombian,  Egyptian, Assyrian, Dutch, and Roman art along with some contemporary American art.

Chris Burden Urban Light. 2008

Continue reading