Page 33 - 2015 Travel Guide to California

ZEISS TELESCOPE at Griffith
Observatory, Los Angeles, right;
details of the Getty Center, Los
Angeles, below.
tainly be the opening of the architecturally
dazzling Broad Museum, featuring more
than 2,000 works of contemporary art.
One highlight of a California visit is
often the renowned Getty Museum—
which includes both the Getty Center in
Los Angeles and the Getty Villa in Malibu.
The Villa’s 2015 offerings will include an
exhibition of Roman silver treasure, while
the more contemporary Center (which
spans the Medieval period to the present)
will celebrate Flemish painter Paul
Rubens, gift giving in the Middle Ages,
and—not to be missed—a century of
animal photography.
Pasadena’s wonderful Norton Simon
showcases a spectrum of European and
Modern artists, and includes two of this
writer’s favorite paintings: Picasso’s
Woman with a Book (1932), and Diego
Rivera’s The Flower Vendor (1941). The
sculpture garden is beautiful and serene.
In nearby San Marino, the impressive
Beaux-Arts mansion and grounds of finan-
cier Henry E. Huntington are now The
Huntington Library, with its 120 acres of
botanical gardens. Here you can admire
Audubon’s bird drawings, view an actual
Gutenberg Bible, and wander through one
of the West Coast’s most surreal displays of
flowering cacti and succulents.
Ninety miles north of LA, the Santa Bar-
bara Museum of Art is renowned for its
ambitious and imaginative exhibitions. An
equal distance to the south, San Diego’s
Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa
Park is California’s only museum dedi-
cated exclusively to photography, film and
video. MoPA’s 2015 exhibitions will include
the groundbreaking 7 billion Others: video
portraits filmed in 84 countries by 20
directors.
San Francisco’s two most important art
museums are as architecturally different
as two buildings can be. The Legion of
Honor—set in Lincoln Park, on a hill over-
looking the Golden Gate Bridge and Pacific
Ocean—is a ¾-scale recreation of Paris’
Palais de la Légion d’Honneur, and holds
an extraordinary collection of drawings as
well as changing exhibitions from around
the world. At the entrance, surrounded by
Beaux-Arts columns, sits The Thinker—one
of 70 Rodins in the museum’s permanent
collection. In nearby Golden Gate Park,
meanwhile, the reimagined de Young is lit-
erally a pillar of modern architecture.
Featuring a 10-story observation tower, the
de Young is Northern California’s premier
metropolitan art museum, showcasing the
arts of Africa, Oceania and the New World.
Special exhibits in 2015 will include Keith
Haring, J. M. W. Turner, and a dazzling dis-
play of “Royal Hawaiian Featherwork.”
The San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art (SFMOMA) is in the midst of renova-
tions, and will remain closed until 2016.
Their motto is, “We’ve temporarily moved...
everywhere.” Check their website (see
sidebar) for their satellite exhibitions at
various locations around the Bay Area.
A short BART ride (or drive across the
Bay Bridge) from San Francisco, the Oak-
land Museum of California is dedicated to
the arts, history and ecology of California.
This handsome gem is one of the state’s
finest museums, offering temporary
exhibits on themes ranging from the Day
of the Dead to “A Cinematic Study of Fog.”
The museum’s beautiful new wing on Cal-
ifornia’s Natural History opened in 2013
and includes displays of life and work
from the Gold Rush to Hollywood, from
the Beats to the Tech Boom. And while
you’re in the East Bay, check out the
Berkeley Art Museum—on the campus of
UC Berkeley—with its often odd mix of
super-contemporary, Abstract Expres-
sionist and traditional Asian art.
Science
The marvelous California Science Center in
Los Angeles’ Exposition Park claims to be
the largest hands-on science museum on
the West Coast, with ongoing exhibits on
invention, space travel and life sciences.
Visitors can get up close and personal with
the Space Shuttle Endeavor or explore some
of the Earth’s harshest ecosystems, from
boiling sea vents to the polar zones. The
most amazing thing of all? It’s free!
Ten years and half a billion dollars in
the making, the California Academy of Sci-
ences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park
2015 T R AV E L G U I D E TO C A L I F O R N I A 31