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.

This gallery of the ancient Americas includes a large collection of artifacts from West Mexico. About 2000 years ago, powerful rulers began building large ceremonial centers in the region comprising the modern states of Nayarit, Jalisco and Colima. Unlike their peers in other ancient Mexican cultures, they constructed elaborate subterranean shaft and chamber tombs for their ancestors.

You can't see them from down here, but the roof over your head is blanketed in 493 solar panels. Together these panels produce nearly 100,000 watts of electricity per day, which is used to power the Chris Burden artwork, Urban Light.