Los Angeles Art Museums

The Best Art Museums in and Around Los Angeles

By Kayte Deioma, About.com Guide

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11. Annenberg Space for Photography

The Annenberg Space for Photography in Century City is a relatively small space, but using a variety of multimedia exhibit tools, you could spend many hours perusing photo exhibits. Although fine art photography is not the focus of the Annenberg Space, and you might equally well find stunning landscapes or grisly images of war and famine, the art of photography is definitely in evidence.

12. The Craft and Folk Art Museum - CAFAM

The Craft and Folk Art Museum on Museum Row in Los Angeles

The Craft and Folk Art Museum, on Museum Row across from LACMA, takes a broad view of folk art as "all art made in a cultural and social context." So don't expect to be limited to African wood carvings and Hmong needlework, although they are part of the collection. Exhibits might feature furniture, textiles, musical instruments or any manner of human creation.

13. UCLA Hammer Museum

The UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood, next to the UCLA campus, features rotating exhibits from their collections which range from French masters to historic political art and graphic design to contemporary artists of the last decade with emphasis on Southern California artists. The Museum's sculpture garden is actually on the UCLA campus. The Hammer Museum is known for having one of the best art bookstores in the country.

14. Pacific Asia Museum

The Pacific Asia Museum is a compact museum in Pasadena featuring arts and crafts from Asia and the Pacific Islands.

15. Fowler Museum at UCLA

The Fowler Museum on the UCLA campus focuses on the past and present cultural arts of Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands and the Americas. They have a massive collection of artifacts, but only a small portion can be on display at any given time.

16. Long Beach Museum of Art - LBMA

I rank the Long Beach Museum of Art above the Santa Monica Museum of Art and Orange County Museum of Art because they have items from their permanent collection on exhibit (even if they're not very interesting) as well as having some high quality temporary exhibits, and because they have by far the best view of the three. The Long Beach Museum of Art is perched on the bluff above the beach in Long Beach. I visit more to have lunch at Claire's restaurant overlooking the beach than for the art.

17. Santa Monica Museum of Art - SMMoA

Santa Monica Museum of Art is a small museum located inside the Bergamot Station art complex. Although the Santa Monica Museum of Art does host interesting and thought provoking temporary exhibits, one of the best things about it for art lovers is that it is surrounded by a dozen art galleries, where you can view for free and purchase the work of established and emerging artists.

18. Orange County Museum of Art - OCMA

The Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach is a small modern and contemporary art museum with a collection that focuses heavily on California artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. This is a great little museum for discovering up and coming artists. OCMA's California Biennial exhibits feature innovative contemporary artists of California. There is no permanent exhibit.

19. Pasadena Museum of California Art - PMCA

The Pasadena Museum of California Art is a small museum in Pasadena that presents the work of California artists in exhibits designed to put California art and design into a greater context.

20. USC Fisher Museum of Art

The USC Fisher Museum of Art owns some really cool stuff, including Armand Hammer's earlier collection of Dutch, Flemish, German and Italian master that he donated to USC before starting a whole other collection that he then gave to UCLA. However the chances of seeing many of the Fisher's masterpieces are slim, since there are more exhibits of outside work than of the museum's own collection. Other temporary exhibits may or may not be of interest to the general public.