Museum row and the two Getty sites

Two axes hold most of the art in the city

Los Angeles has no museum district in the way older cities do, but it comes close on two lines. The first is Wilshire Boulevard, where LACMA and the La Brea Tar Pits sit next to each other in Hancock Park with several smaller museums within a few blocks. The second runs west: the Getty Center on a ridge above Brentwood, and the Getty Villa on the coast in Malibu.

LACMA is the encyclopedic collection, the widest range of anything in the region. It has been in the middle of a long building project as a new structure replaces several of the old ones, so what is open and where things hang changes. Check what is on before you commit an afternoon. The Tar Pits next door are an active excavation, which is stranger and better than the dioramas suggest, since fossils are still coming out of the asphalt in the middle of the city.

The two Getty sites are one institution with two very different buildings, and treating them as a single visit is the common mistake. The Center holds European painting, drawings, photography and the gardens. The Villa is antiquities, in a reconstructed Roman country house looking at the ocean.

Reserve the Getty, and pick your side of town

Both Getty sites ask you to reserve a timed entry, and both charge for parking rather than for admission. Book before you drive over. At the Center you park at the bottom and ride a tram up the hill, which takes longer than people expect on a busy afternoon, so build that in.

Geography matters more than the schedule here. The Getty Villa sits on Pacific Coast Highway, which makes it natural to pair with a Malibu beach day and awkward to pair with anything inland. The Getty Center sits above the Sepulveda Pass, on the single worst stretch of freeway in the region at rush hour. Crossing that pass on a weekday late afternoon will cost you more time than the museum did.

Wilshire is the easier weekday visit and the harder weekend one. LACMA runs late into the evening on some days, which is the quietest way to see it and the version locals use. Hours and closure days differ at all four of these places and shift seasonally, so confirm for the day you are going rather than trusting a plan made a month ago.

One note on the outdoor pieces. The lamppost installation on the LACMA campus is free to stand under and does not require a ticket, which is the only reason a good number of people come at all. It is busiest at dusk.