Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90036
323-857-6010
www.lacma.com

New ways to experience art

While art museums worldwide have been discussing how to vitalize the art museum's audience experience, LACMA has taken the lead by establishing LACMA Lab.  This research and development unit is to develop, test, and apply experimental approaches to engaging, educating, and enlightening the public through art and art making.

Under the direction of Robert Sain, LACMA Lab serves the museum's think tank.  It employs interdisciplinary project teams, a changing mix of experts from within and outside the museum--- artists, curators, educators, psychologists, designers, and others advised by members of the public.  Their responsibility is to produce inventive exhibitions and installations that may include commissioning leading artists to produce new works of art, developing workshops and residencies, and employing new media technologies in experimental ways.

LACMA Lab is based on the premise that understanding and participating in art making heightens the capacity for critical thinking, problem solving, risk taking, and managing ambiguity and paradox.  It uses art making, and the museum setting to create new learning experiences for all of our visitors.  Equally important, it challenges the museum and its staff to think about what they do in new ways.  It is the laboratory for testing new approaches to connecting audience to art, for discarding failures and incorporating successes.

www.artdesignstudio.com