Whoever said that L.A. lacked culture? L.A. has over 300 museums in the metro area (most museums per capita in the world). And they aren't your ordinary museums, L.A. has museums that most cities in the U.S. would envy to have. And L.A. has the richest Museum in the world, the Getty Center with over $1,000,000,000 in funding ($1 billion). Here are just some of the many neat museums around L.A.
GETTY CENTER - 6 floor 24 acre campus on a 110 acre site. Contains 50 galleries, a library with over 750,000 volumes, and basically a fully fledged Cultural center. A quote from artcom.com:
"Located near the San Diego Freeway (interstate 405) and the Santa Monica Freeway (interstate 10) in Los Angeles, the Getty Center is the new home of the J. Paul Getty Trust, a foundation devoted to the visual arts and the humanities. The main public destination on the six-building campus is the new J. Paul Getty Museum which features European paintings, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, sculpture, decorative arts, and American and European photographs, changing exhibitions, and a wide range of programs for visitors of every age to enjoy, including gallery talks, lectures, film screenings, concerts, and family activities--most offered in both English and Spanish. The Getty Research Institute Library at the Getty Center is a resource for scholars, college and university faculty, graduate students, curators, and independent researchers. "
photo credits: getty.edu
HUNTINGTON LIBRARY - Cultural center, 207 acres: One of the largest research libraries in the world at over 5 million books, manuscripts, prints, photographs, maps, etc... Includes an vast art gallery that contains one of the most comprehensive collections in this country of British and French art of the 18th and 19th centuries. A quote from Britannica.com:
"library and cultural institution created in 1919 at San Marino, Calif., near Los Angeles, by Henry E. Huntington and left as a public trust upon his death. Huntington, a railroad tycoon, began collecting books early in the 20th century, and the library is rich in rare books and manuscripts, mostly English and American. The library also contains collections of incunabula and an outstanding collection of portraits and landscapes by such English painters as Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and George Romney. During his lifetime, Huntington purchased, among others, the entire collections of the E. Dwight Church Library of Americana and the Wilberforce Eames collection of 12,000 early American imprints. The library and the mansion in which it is housed were deeded to the American public in perpetuity."
150 acres of the 207 acre Huntington estate is a huge Botanical gardens with 15 different themes ranging from desert to tropical, having a total of 15,000 varieties of plants, shrubs, and trees.
photo credits: seeing-stars.com, beachcalifornia.com, huntington.org
LOS ANGELES MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART (MOCA)
LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART (one of the largest permenant art collections in the U.S. at 110,000+ works)
CALIFORNIA SCIENCE CENTER & AEROSPACE MUSEUM (part of exposition park)
NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY (part of exposition park)
quote from http://www.lalc.k12.ca.us/
"Since 1913, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County has grown to be the third largest natural science and cultural history museum in the country. The Museum's concentration in the life sciences, earth sciences, and history make it unique among large American museums. More than 30 million specimens and artifacts from over 4.5 billion years of earth history are in the collections. "
Learn more about this museum at http://www.seeing-stars.com/Museums/NaturalHistoryMuseum.shtml
Museum of Neon Art - the only one of its kind in the world
Japanese American National Museum
Movieland Wax Museum - largest wax museum in the United States
learn more about this museum at http://www.seeing-stars.com/Museums/Movieland.shtml
J. Paul Getty Museum (Getty Villa)
Museum of Television & Radio
Gene Autry Museum of Western heritage
photo credits: visit-los-angeles.com
Petersen Automotive Museum (300,000 square feet of a huge collection of cars from every era, including history and other stuff about automobiles (including cars from the movies). It also holds events like Cobra Day 2000 (on the museum roof parking) where even Jay Leno can visit!) Check out this website for a review on this museum here
Hollywood Guinness Book of world records museum
credits: tjm.org