In Spring 2026, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will open the new David Geffen Galleries by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. In the building’s layout and in the curatorial approach, the new galleries are designed to encourage visitors to think across traditional silos and hierarchies in LACMA’s encyclopedic collection. There is no main entrance, the collection is organized on a single level (that spans Wilshire Boulevard), and many of the galleries have been curated thematically to include objects from multiple departments. The opening of the Geffen Galleries also marks the return to public display of the Museum’s impressive collection of works relating to Venice and the Veneto, including paintings by Titian, Veronese, and Tiepolo, Venetian glassworks and ceramics, as well as textiles and other decorative objects. Dr. David Bardeen, Assistant Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, will lead a tour of the Museum’s Venetian and other Italian highlights, and how the new building brings Venice’s extraordinary role in global art history vividly to light.

Led by Dr. David Bardeen, Assistant Curator, European Painting and Sculpture, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Dr. Bardeen is Assistant Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at LACMA and former David E. Finley Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. He has published and lectured nationally and internationally on various aspects of Renaissance and early modern European art history, and is the author of a forthcoming book that examines the relationship between Italian intarsia, the form of illusionistic wood inlay, and painting. He received a PhD in Art History from UCLA, a Masters Degree from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, and his BA from Harvard College.

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Image: Allegory of Navigation with a Cross-Staff, Paolo Caliari Veronese (Italy, Venice, 1528-1588), Italy, 1555-1560