Sea change: inside LACMA’s new curatorial strategy

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is using its forthcoming David Geffen Galleries to advance a curatorial strategy championed by CEO and director Michael Govan that breaks down traditional departmental divisions. With 45 curators invited to rethink cross-collection display, the museum aims to replace discipline- and era-specific rooms with multi-sightline adjacencies that create new historical connections, according to curators Britt Salvesen and Leah Lehmbeck. A framework proposed by junior curators organizes galleries around bodies of water—the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans—to emphasize how objects and ideas have circulated through maritime routes. One anchor work is Todd Gray’s 27-foot-long commissioned entrance sculpture Octavia’s Gaze (2025), made with UV-cured aluminum printing designed to withstand strong natural light and positioned to connect African and Latin American galleries across a transatlantic theme.

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