How To Find One Magical Museum of Art

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

With 90 paintings on display from its permanent collection, the presentation entitled “MONET TO MORISOT — The Real and Imagined in European Art” illustrates 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.

MONET TO MORISOT will be displayed through November 12, 2023

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 containing 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. This fantastic show closed in September 2023.

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 the show “James Tissot: Fashion + Faith” (2019-2020) organized with the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie, or the collaboration with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. entitled “Sargent and Spain” (2023), we hope you were able to take in “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England” which closed on September 24, 2023 at the Legion of Honor. We present highlights from these three exhibits for your pleasure.

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

Having already been seen at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Cleveland Museum of Art, the presentation of “The Tudors” at the Legion of Honor represented your final opportunity to appreciate this exhibition in person. The show entitled “Botticelli Drawings” is being displayed at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco from November 19 through February 11, 2024.

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 such as the previous show devoted to Frank Bowling.

“Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966 — 1975” closed on September 10, 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, to see the costume (above) designed for Julia Roberts in Mirror, Mirror. An exhibit on Casablanca continues through March 17, 2024. An immersive film experience created by Pedro Almodóvar can be seen until April 7, 2024. The Godfather exhibition may be enjoyed through January 5, 2025.

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 Los Angeles County Museum of Art is closed for extensive renovations, “The Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA” building on the same site (5905 Wilshire Boulevard) remains open, presenting works of art from the permanent collection plus focused exhibitions such as “Eternal Medium: Seeing the World in Stone” through February 11, 2024. This exhibit demonstrates the impressive use of stone, especially richly patterned and vividly colored stone, as a diverse medium for the creation of art.

The Broad Museum

Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody

This past year, the Broad presented the first-ever museum exhibition in Los Angeles devoted to the oeuvre created by the American Keith Haring (1958 — 1990). Featuring 120 works, including drawing, video, sculpture, painting and other mediums, this expansive overview entitled “Art Is for Everybody” was seen in L.A. through October 8, 2023 and is now at the AGO in Toronto until March 17, 2024. The Haring show is scheduled to travel to Minneapolis, where it will be on view from April through September 2024.

From November 18 through April 7, 2024, the Broad is presenting “Desire, Knowledge, and Hope (with Smog)” to showcase works of art created by Los Angeles-based artists. This exhibit will include several artists new to the Broad’s collection, including Sayre Gomez, Joe Ray and Njideka Akunyili Crosby.

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 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 feel we have found our magical destination for culture in Cleveland. We returned to Ohio for a second visit in October 2023 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. Two special exhibitions, described below, will be on view until January 2024.

Temporary Exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art

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

September 10, 2023 — January 7, 2024

This large exhibition features more than 200 objects from the region of China called Jiangnan. The lush, green scenery of Jiangnan has inspired artists to create the heavenly images in jade, porcelain and lacquer presently on display. In addition, bamboo carvings, prints and paintings from Neolithic times to the 18th century help convey 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 is glorious!

“Degas and the Laundress” Will Close on January 14, 2024

The Cleveland Museum of Art, one of the 10 best U.S. art museums, is also presenting an exhibition entitled “Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism” from October 8, 2023 through January 14, 2024. We had high hopes for this landmark exhibit; however, with only five oil paintings on canvas by Edgar Degas on view, we were disappointed. There are paintings by a number of other artists on display, 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 show is way too small to be significant and does not warrant your travel to Cleveland at this time. The CMA should have sought additional loans from American and international collections, such as the Norton Simon Museum.

Highlights from the Permanent Collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art

There are a number of cultural attractions to be found in Cleveland, Ohio, and you agenda should also include a visit to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.