The Secret Life of LA’s Small Museums

Los Angeles has cemented its status as a global art capital over the past two decades, with the arrival of several new museums, not to mention the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s long-awaited expansion. In Also on View: Unique and Unexpected Museums of Greater Los Angeles (2024), Todd Lerew argues that the region’s cultural strength lies not only in these high-profile cultural institutions but also in our local, offbeat, and often under-recognized museums. Indeed, by Lerew’s count, greater LA has more than 750 museums (which the author has chronicled at everymuseum.la), more than any other American city and on par with art hubs like London and Paris. As he writes in the book’s forward: “The commercial art market, and the presence and activities of mainstream museums, can often be misconstrued as standing in for culture more broadly.”

Lerew defines museums expansively, and the 64 institutions he profiles are located in high schools, restaurants, state parks, a tattoo parlor, and, in true LA fashion, strip malls. He also takes an expansive view of Los Angeles itself, including LA, Orange, and Riverside Counties, as well as parts of the Inland Empire.

There is a fair dose of whimsy here, but the book is at its most impactful when drawing attention to the ways in which museums are elevating the stories of communities that have historically been excluded from mainstream cultural institutions, despite the region’s rich diasporic fabric. The Ararat-Eskijian Museum, for one, has been celebrating Armenian-American culture for a quarter century from its location inside a senior care facility. Founded in 1985 by Luther Eskijian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, its holdings include paintings by André “Darvish” Sevrugian and Jirayr Zorthian, the artist whose famed ranch was almost completely destroyed in the recent Eaton Fire, and a memorial featuring bone fragments from unknown Genocide victims. Meanwhile, the mobile African American Miniature Museum showcases the work of Karen Collins, who has created roughly 50 shadow boxes depicting scenes of Black life and history including Martin Luther King Jr. preaching, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and Kendrick Lamar.

Lerew also visits other organizations focusing on the region’s physical environment, including the Valley Relics Museum, a pop-culture wonderland of neon signs and ephemera filling two hangars at the Van Nuys airport; the Street Light Museum, which features some of the more than four hundred different lamp designs that illuminate the city’s streets; and the Southern California Railway Museum, which houses the largest extant collection of Pacific Electric Red Car trolleys, “the world’s largest electric railway transit system in the 1920s” that spread throughout LA before the rise of the automobile. Notably, it was Henry Huntington — whose former home and art collection form the core of the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens — who owned LA’s streetcar system, just one of several connecting threads between cultural institutions across the city.

As much as they chronicle communities and places, many of these museums reflect the obsessions, and often eccentricities, of individuals who have helped shape the cultural landscape of LA. Some of these are like time capsules preserved in amber, while others have been updated and transformed over the years, reflecting multiple identities. These range from El Alisal, the castle-like former residence of journalist and ethnographer Charles Lummis, to the Ojai home of “Mama of Dada” Beatrice Wood and the Echo Park parsonage of legendary evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

The compendium includes contemporary examples that could be considered living artworks themselves, like the Velaslavasay Panorama, a converted theater founded by Sara Velas that revives the 19th-century moving panorama artform featuring a large painting in the round augmented by sculptural elements, sound, and lights. The Museum of Jurassic Technology is the brainchild of MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner David Wilson, who founded the awe-inspiring, labyrinthine cabinet of curiosities in the early 1980s. Created with impeccable craftsmanship, the exhibits blend fact and fiction, science and art, and reveal as much about museology and the history of display as they do about their individual subjects, from Medieval bestiaries to Russian space dogs to Islamic design in Medieval Spain.

Lerew names “the most unique and underrated museum in Southern California,” though, as the Antelope Valley Indian Museum State Historic Park, which confronts its own contentious history of collecting. The museum began with Native artifacts collected by artist Howard Arden Edwards in the early 20th century through plunderous means that were all too common at the time, such as grave robbing. Recently, however, the museum has started to reconsider how to address this legacy. In 2023, it began repatriating objects to the
San Nicolas, San Miguel, and San Clemente Islands, with plans to consult with local tribes on the creation of new exhibits. 

In an age when nearly identical art fairs bounce from continent to continent, and cities try to outshine their neighbors with starchitect-designed art repositories, Also on View makes a case for the hyper-local as a crucial element of a robust cultural ecosystem — not in an oppositional relationship to these larger institutions, but in a symbiotic one. “These objects wouldn’t make sense under the same roof, couldn’t be given equal attention by any one institution,” Lerew writes, “and are better off left, whenever possible, in the place from which they originate or with the people they directly represent.”

Also on View: Unique and Unexpected Museums of Greater Los Angeles (2024) by Todd Lerew with photography by Ryan Schude is published by Angel City Press at the Los Angeles Public Library and is available online and through independent booksellers.