What to Know
- 10899 Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood
- Free daily admission to exhibitions and programs
- A large-scale "reimagining" of the art museum will be unveiled over the final weekend of March 2023; gallery space has increased by 60 percent
While a canvas can be transformed by a few deftly placed brushstrokes, and a sculpture can seem changed by an extra handful of well-applied clay, an established destination for art can take longer to transform.
A lot longer, because a building is rather bigger than a painting, and there are more components to consider: Gallery size, how people enter the structure, where they'll go, and whether the mission of the museum, and its quintessential magic, are fully conveyed by every public space.
Transform, though, art institutions sometimes do, lucky us. And a newly "reimagined" Hammer Museum at UCLA is ready to make its official, dazzle-heavy debut.
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The unveiling is taking place over the final weekend of March, with a special members celebration on March 25 and a public welcome on March 26.
At the scintillating center of the festivities is the newly named Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center, while a host of exciting inaugural exhibitions, including "The Network," a dramatic lobby-based work by Chiharu Shiota, are making their debut at the Westwood destination.
Longtime visitors will also note how much more capacious the museum feels; gallery space has been increased by 60 percent and its dramatic street-facing presence spans a "full city block."
Gracing the Hammer's new street-level gallery is Rita McBride's "Particulates," an installation that takes its imaginative cues, in part, from time travel.
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If Hammer Museum fans could travel back in time, they may recall that there wasn't a prominent street-level entrance to the building, but that has also changed with this recent phase of the years-long renovation.
A "spacious new lobby" designed by Michael Maltzan Architecture, spots that provide inventive display spaces for a scintillating slate of artworks, and other major updates have changed the exciting sense of arrival at the bustling hub of ideas and imagination.
There've been a number of chapters, spanning an impressive amount of time, to the museum's transformation, which has taken around two decades to complete.
New life was given to the central courtyard just over a decade ago — it is now the Pritzer Family Commons, a dynamic gathering space — and the third floor, where the addition of the John V. Tunney Bridge in 2015 added more connectivity between galleries.
For everything new at the Hammer Museum, its free-entry policy, the popular programs of the Billy Wilder Theater, and a peek inside the luminous new lobby, visit this site now.
Pictured: "The Network" by Chiharu Shiota at the Hammer Museum in Westwood
