How To Find One Magical Museum of Art

Tired of cookie-cutter museums with antiseptic white walls and uninspired exhibits, we started our search in New York City, then flew to California, and finally traveled to the Midwest — in order to find a special home for art lovers, one magical museum of art. We visited the Brooklyn Museum, the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, SFMOMA, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, the Getty Center in L.A., the Broad, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Brooklyn Has One of the Best U.S. Museums

The Brooklyn Museum was planned to be the largest museum of art in the world when it was founded in 1898. The original design called for a museum four times as large as what was created when the initial phase of construction ended in 1927.

Today, the Brooklyn Museum possesses an art collection with 500,000 objects, New York City’s second largest after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Thanks to major renovations near the end of the 20th century the Brooklyn Museum is now revitalized, and since 2007 “The Dinner Party” by Judy Chicago has been on permanent display as the centerpiece for the museum’s Center for Feminist Art.

The COVID-19 pandemic, with its negative impact on museum revenue, led the museum to sell dozens of paintings including works by Corot, Courbet and Lucas Cranach the Elder in order to care for its expansive collections of African, Egyptian and American art. Committed to presenting vibrant temporary exhibitions — from traditional to challenging, and edgy at times — the Brooklyn Museum remains popular within the local community and far beyond the borough.

With 90 paintings on display in 2023 from its permanent collection, the presentation entitled “MONET TO MORISOT — The Real and Imagined in European Art” illustrated the depth of fine art possessed by the Brooklyn Museum and its willingness as an institution to question how the traditional canon for collecting European art was constructed through the narrow lens of gender, class and colonialism.

Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party”

The Brooklyn Museum describes “The Dinner Party” as “an important icon of 1970s feminist art and a milestone in twentieth-century art.” This groundbreaking and influential work of art, created between 1974 and 1979 by Judy Chicago, is set on a gigantic triangular banquet table with 39 place settings. Each setting — complete with utensils, a gold chalice and a painted porcelain plate bearing vulvar/butterfly motifs — commemorates the achievements of a distinguished woman from history.

A Special Exhibition About Queer / Asian Identity & Culture

The Brooklyn Museum presented the exhibit EAST OF SUN, WEST OF MOON in its Gallery of Contemporary Art during the summer of 2023. This fantastic show featuring 11 paintings by Oscar yi Hou marked his first museum solo in the United States. These works of art are purposefully anachronistic, and yi Hou often casts himself and his friends as masculine East Asian figures from Western popular culture and history. The cranes shown in the background, above and below, indicate that these paintings may also be considered self-portraits by yi Hou, since his given Chinese name refers to an idiom involving a bird. Born in Liverpool in 1998, and now a Brooklyn resident, Oscar yi Hou chooses complex iconography to challenge long-standing stereotypes of the queer, Asian creative community.

The Legion of Honor, San Francisco

The Legion of Honor is known for its classy exhibitions of fine art and fashion. If you did not get a chance to see “James Tissot: Fashion + Faith” organized with the Musée d’Orsay in 2020, or two exhibits on display during 2023 — “Sargent and Spain” and “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England” — we are presenting herein highlights from these three exhibits for your pleasure.

More than 100 objects (including the iconic portraits shown below) were on view in San Francisco tracing the emergence of a distinctly English style through the artistic patronage of the Tudor courts in the 1500s.

In addition to temporary exhibitions, the Legion of Honor offers interesting paintings and sculptures in its collection.

ART LOVERS TIP: From the Legion of Honor, you’ll have an unusual view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the natural beauty surrounding San Francisco. In addition, your purchase of a ticket to the Legion of Honor includes same-day admission to view the permanent collection at the de Young Museum (located inside Golden Gate Park). The de Young also offers unique special exhibitions, such as the current show entitled “Tamara de Lempicka” — on display through February 9, 2025.

Heading North from San Francisco

Should you want to take a break from museums and city life, we recommend you visit wine country in Napa Valley, the redwood forest at Muir Woods and the charming waterfront in Sausalito — all of which can be accomplished in a one-day trip north of San Francisco.

Founded in 1935, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) underwent a major three-year-long expansion from 2013 to 2016 which doubled the museum’s gallery space, and provided almost six times as much public space — perfect for exhibiting large-scale sculpture, contemporary art, and spacious retrospectives.

The Show “Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966 — 1975” was on Display in 2023

Several journeys across the Atlantic Ocean affected the life and art of Frank Bowling, who was born in British Guiana in 1934 and lived in London from 1953 until 1965. This exhibition at SFMOMA explored Bowling’s innovative movement toward abstraction during the decade he lived in New York. His cross-cultural paintings exploring transformative techniques are imbued with historical awareness and personal significance.

Norton Simon’s collection is unique among U.S. Museums

In Southern California, the pleasant city of Pasadena with 136,000 residents is a perfect place for art lovers to relax for a few days. In fact, you might find the Victorian and art deco buildings located in the center of Old Pasadena so attractive that you will decide to use Pasadena as a base for exploring Los Angeles.

Pasadena is the primary cultural center of the San Gabriel Valley due in large part to the Norton Simon Museum, where a $5,000,000 renovation in 1995 by Frank Gehry resulted in more intimate galleries and improved lighting to house the 11,000 objects in the collection of European and Asian art.

Art Lovers TIP: By car or train, travel from Pasadena to downtown Los Angeles takes about 30 minutes. Film lovers should visit the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, located next to LACMA. Above, the costume designed for Julia Roberts in Mirror, Mirror.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has grown enormously since its founding in 1961 to become the largest art museum in the western United States, and receives 1,000,000 visitors each year.

While the new building for housing the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s vast holdings is currently under construction, the Resnick Pavilion and “The Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA” (located on the same site: 5905 Wilshire Boulevard) remain open, presenting works of art from the permanent collection plus focused exhibitions. The opening of the David Geffen Galleries is anticipated to take place in the Spring of 2026.

The Broad Museum

Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody

The Broad presented the first-ever museum exhibition in Los Angeles devoted to the oeuvre created by the American Keith Haring (1958 — 1990) in 2023. Featuring 120 works, including drawing, video, sculpture, painting and other mediums, this expansive overview entitled “Art Is for Everybody” traveled to Toronto and Minneapolis in 2024.

Admission is Free at the Broad

The Broad displays expansive presentations of art by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol and recently displayed works by Los Angeles-based artists, including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, and Yayoi Kusama. While general admission is free, we suggest you reserve timed tickets in advance. There may be a fee for certain events and exhibits, so check their website.

Yayoi Kusama

The Getty Center

Dedication

We owe special thanks to Alberto Uribe for his depth of knowledge about the arts scene in California. Alberto Uribe is a true lover of the arts, and this article was made possible through Alberto’s generosity, command of history, and kindness.

The Cleveland Museum of Art

The Cleveland Museum of Art (also called the “CMA”) is a knock-out and, like the Brooklyn Museum, offers programs, artwork and exhibitions that speak eloquently to both the local community and to a larger audience of art lovers at the national and international levels. We found our magical destination for culture in Cleveland.

We returned to Ohio for additional visits in order to continue our exploration of everything the Cleveland Museum of Art has to offer visitors who make the effort to venture inland from the coasts — beyond more established big-city institutions. The CMA is located in the University Circle neighborhood, home to the Museums of Natural History and Contemporary Art, the Severance Music Center where the Cleveland Orchestra performs, the Botanical Garden, Case Western Reserve University, and adjacent to Little Italy. Admission to the CMA’s permanent collection galleries is always free. Some special exhibitions, described below, are ticketed and require paid admission (with admission ranging from $11.00 for children ages 6-17 and college students; $15.00 for Seniors and a Full Price of $22.00 for adults who do not possess Museum membership).

Temporary Exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art

The new special exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art is entitled “Picasso and Paper.” From December 8, 2024 through March 23, 2025, nearly 300 works of art will explore Pablo Picasso’s lifelong experimentation with paper as a medium. Organized as a collaboration between the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, with major loans from the Musée national Picasso-Paris, this show offers a unique and groundbreaking look at Picasso.

By including a few important paintings and sculptures in this exhibition, “Picasso and Paper” also explores the connections that Picasso saw between media, and the integral role that paper played throughout his artistic practice. Picasso was 20 years old and depressed over the suicide of his close friend when he delved into the melancholic paintings that would become known as his Blue Period (1901-04). “La Vie” (shown above) illustrates how the artist limited his palette to cold colors suggestive of mystery, night, dreams, and death. “Picasso and Paper” features preparatory drawings and other works on paper that correspond directly to Picasso’s paintings, and demonstrate the artist’s examination of related themes.

Highlights from Exhibits You May Have Missed in 2024

China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta

This large exhibition which closed in 2024 featured more than 200 objects from the region of China called Jiangnan. The lush, green scenery of Jiangnan inspired artists to create the heavenly images in jade, porcelain and lacquer that were on display. In addition, bamboo carvings, prints and paintings from Neolithic times to the 18th century conveyed the wealth and importance of this fertile and populous land in the coastal area south of the Yangzi River. This picturesque region has defined the image of traditional China around the world for millennia, and this vast presentation of fine art from the CMA’s substantial holdings was glorious!

“Degas and the Laundress” Closed in January 2024

The Cleveland Museum of Art, one of the 10 best U.S. art museums, also presented an exhibition entitled “Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism” in the winter of 2023-24. We had high hopes for this landmark exhibit; however, with only five oil paintings on canvas by Edgar Degas on view, we were disappointed.

The Edgar Degas show featured paintings by a number of other artists, such as the Vuillard shown below from the CMA’s permanent collection, plus a handful of pastels, charcoal drawings and one oil on paper by Degas. This exhibit was way too small to be significant, and the Cleveland Museum should have obtained loans from American and international collections, such as the Norton Simon Museum.

The Permanent Collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art

The Cleveland Museum of Art ranks among the very finest museums in the U.S.A. There are a number of cultural attractions to be found in Cleveland, Ohio, and your agenda should also include a visit to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.