Artist Robert Irwin’s work in the last five decades has investigated perception and the experience of art. With Miracle Mile, Irwin reconsiders the properties of light, material, and color. The site-specific work subtly plays with the architecture in which it is housed and responds to both Wilshire Boulevard (the storied thoroughfare it faces) and Primal Palm Garden (an outdoor installation created by Irwin in 2008). A linear configuration composed of 66 fluorescent tubes, the work stretches to a length of approximately 36 feet and can be experienced both from within and beyond the gallery walls.

Irwin has stated, “As artists, the one true inquiry of art as a pure subject is an inquiry of our potential to know the world around us and our actively being in it, with a particular emphasis on the aesthetic. This world is not just somehow given to us whole. We perceive, we shape the world, and as artists we discover and give value to our human potential to "see" the infinite richness (beauty?) in everything, creating an extended aesthetic reality.”

LACMA has collected the work of Robert Irwin since the early 1960s. Most recently the museum commissioned Primal Palm Garden, which surrounds BCAM and the Resnick Pavilion.