Explore Los Angeles

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, or MOCA, was founded in 1979 and shows art made since 1940. Its main building on Grand Avenue, designed by Arata Isozaki in red sandstone and opened in 1986, holds a collection of some 7,000 works, with abstract expressionism, pop art and art from Los Angeles.

The Broad is a museum of contemporary art on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, opened in 2015 to show the collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. The building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro wraps the galleries in a white honeycomb-like shell, and the collection of some 2,000 works includes art by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County opened in 1913 in a Beaux-Arts building in Exposition Park. Its collections hold over 35 million specimens and artifacts; visitors see the Dinosaur Hall, the Gem and Mineral Hall, dioramas of African and North American mammals and an exhibition on the history of Los Angeles.

Griffith Observatory stands on the southern slope of Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park and opened in 1935. The Art Deco building holds exhibitions on astronomy, the Samuel Oschin Planetarium and a Zeiss refracting telescope open to the public on clear evenings, and its terraces look out over Los Angeles and the Hollywood Sign.

Ripley's Believe It or Not! Hollywood is a museum of curiosities on Hollywood Boulevard, part of the chain based on the collections of the cartoonist and traveller Robert Ripley. Its rooms show oddities, replicas and artworks made from unusual materials, along with displays on record-breaking people and animals.

The La Brea Tar Pits are natural asphalt seeps in Hancock Park on Wilshire Boulevard where fossils of Ice Age animals such as mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and dire wolves have been dug up since the early 1900s. The La Brea Tar Pits Museum shows the skeletons, and visitors can watch excavation and fossil preparation in progress.

Madame Tussauds Hollywood is a wax museum on Hollywood Boulevard, next to the TCL Chinese Theatre. It opened in 2009 and shows more than a hundred wax figures of film and television actors, musicians and athletes, arranged in themed rooms where visitors can stand beside them for photos.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, known as LACMA, is the largest art museum in the western United States, on Wilshire Boulevard next to the La Brea Tar Pits. Founded in 1961 and opened at this site in 1965, it holds art from antiquity to the present, from Asia, Latin America, Europe and the Islamic world.

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is the film museum of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Wilshire Boulevard. It opened in 2021 in the restored 1939 May Company department store and a spherical theater designed by Renzo Piano, with exhibitions on filmmaking, film history and the Oscars.

The Petersen Automotive Museum on Wilshire Boulevard shows the history and culture of the car across three floors. Founded in 1994 by the publisher Robert E. Petersen, it was given a new façade of red and silver steel ribbons in 2015. Its rotating exhibitions cover racing cars, film cars and design, and a guided Vault tour shows more of the collection.

The Norton Simon Museum on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena shows the collection assembled by the industrialist Norton Simon, who took over the former Pasadena Art Museum in 1974. It holds European art from the Renaissance to the 20th century, with works by Raphael, Rembrandt, Degas and Van Gogh, and sculpture from South and Southeast Asia.

The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, next to Pasadena, was founded in 1919 by the railway magnate Henry E. Huntington. Its library holds rare books and manuscripts such as a Gutenberg Bible; the art collections include Gainsborough's The Blue Boy, and some 49 hectares of themed gardens surround the buildings.