The Bhagavad-Gita Diorama Museum is not easy to find. It is hidden down a passageway in the Hare Krishna temple complex on a side street in Culver City. Although a sign outside advertised the museum as open, the front door was locked one fall morning; it took five minutes for a worker to arrive and reveal its warren of 11 dioramas depicting Hare Krishna history.
The Martial Arts History Museum, 22 miles away by car in Burbank, is more conducive to a visit. It’s on Magnolia Boulevard, one of the main thoroughfares in the San Fernando Valley — but at 2,000 square feet, it is so cramped that the museum has turned away buses of schoolchildren who wanted to view, among other artefacts, a headband worn by Ralph Macchio in “The Karate Kid Part II.”
“This is the first and only museum of its kind, can you believe it?” said its president, Michael Matsuda. “The only one in the world that covers all the martial arts.”
Over the past decade, Los Angeles has emerged as a global arts centre, renowned for such prominent museums as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Broad and, most recently, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. But less visible is an extensive and important network of smaller museums, catering to niche audiences interested in topics like olive growing and the Garifuna people of the Caribbean.
These museums, hundreds of them, reflect the idiosyncrasies and specialised interests of their founders while offering a window into the ethnic, cultural and historical diversity that has come to define Southern California.
“These alternate spaces have transformed LA,” said Jordan Karney Chaim, a contemporary arts historian in San Diego.
The variety and breadth of museums in Los Angeles reflect the overall expansion in the art scene here that began in the 1970s, when space was more plentiful and rents were lower.
Many are little known for a reason: They have odd hours or barely advertise their existence, or are the passion projects of one or two people, with no paid staff. And many of them are not trying for mass market appeal. There are museums devoted to skateboarding, tattoos, automobiles, bunnies, neon, sneakers, aviation, citrus trees and the Salvation Army.
Todd Lerew, the director of special projects at the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, has spent the past eight years trying to visit every museum in the region — 760, by his estimate. He has chronicled his first 650 visits on a spreadsheet and is preparing a book on his discoveries.
“I take an obsessive approach to all of my interests,” said Lerew, who often drives as far as 200 miles in a day. “When I want to know something, I want to know everything.”
His estimate reflects an expansive definition of Los Angeles — in this case, the entire metropolis, from the Pacific Ocean to the Mojave Desert — and an expansive definition of the word “museum,” which includes a one-wall exhibition chronicling the history of the original bakery at what is now the Helms Bakery District, a collection of design shops and restaurants. But if imprecise, his findings are testimony to the concentration of museums, scholarly and quirky, that arts leaders view as part of the cultural core of Southern California.
“LA is a very big, sprawling city, and it is not surprising that museum spaces would be found in pockets of neighbourhoods all across the city,” said Patricia Hills, a retired professor of art and architecture at Boston University. “Many ethnic groups have their own pride of place, and public space galleries and museums are one way to express their culture and creative output.”
Some of the museums, unknown and located in remote parts of a large county, struggle to get people through the door. The Ararat-Eskijian Museum, which claims to be the only Armenian museum on the West Coast, and lies on a sprawling assisted living facility for older Armenians in Mission Hills, is lucky to draw 25 people a week. Its main floor exhibition space displays paintings, jewellery, ceramics, religious artefacts and rugs, including several made by Armenian orphans.
The museum has organised lectures on Armenian history to try to increase attendance, but truth be told, its audience is people who stumble across it while visiting relatives.
“People will say, ‘I’ll go to the Getty,’ ” said Marguerite Mangassarian Goschin, the museum’s director. “But ‘I’ll go to the Eskijian?’ This is a very isolated area.”
There are 1,100 museums nationwide that are accredited by the American Alliance of Museums; 76 of those are in California, with 10 in the city of Los Angeles. But that is just a small fraction of the 30,000 museums that the alliance estimates exist nationwide. Most have not submitted to the accreditation process, which requires a formal structure — such as a rigorous mission statement — that can be daunting for these freewheeling organisations. — NYT
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