Sculpture Garden Near Me on Wilshire: LACMA's Free Outdoor Rodins and Lamps

The easiest sculpture garden near me in central Los Angeles costs nothing and never really closes. Along Wilshire Boulevard at LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd, the museum's outdoor collection is free with no ticket: Chris Burden's Urban Light glows all night, Michael Heizer's 340-ton Levitated Mass sits over its trench from sunrise to sunset, and the Rodin bronzes of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Garden have a new home beside the David Geffen Galleries that opened this year.

LACMA sits in Hancock Park, 30 acres in the middle of the city that also hold the La Brea Tar Pits and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The park itself is open from 6 am to 10 pm. The big change is the David Geffen Galleries by Peter Zumthor, an elevated, 900-foot-long building that spans Wilshire Boulevard with 110,000 square feet of galleries. LACMA officially opened it on April 19, 2026, after a members-only preview.

The project also opened about 3.5 acres of new outdoor space, which LACMA is filling with public art. In July 2026 the museum's own Unframed blog published a tour of works that, in its words, are free for everyone with no ticket required. That list is the best map for a free afternoon here, and it is longer than most visitors expect.

Start on the south side of Wilshire with Urban Light. Burden installed it in February 2008, setting 202 historic street lamps from the 1920s and 1930s in tight repeating rows. LACMA says the lamps come in 17 different designs gathered from cities in and around Los Angeles. For the work's tenth anniversary in 2018, all 309 incandescent bulbs were replaced with LEDs.

The lamps switch on at dusk and off at dawn on an astronomical timer, and the installation is accessible on Wilshire 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That makes it the one piece you can visit after dinner. For photos without a crowd, come early on a weekday morning, when the posts throw long shadows but the lights are off, or late at night when the boulevard quiets down.

Behind the Resnick Pavilion lies Levitated Mass, conceived by Heizer in 1969 and realized in 2012. It is a 340-ton, 21-foot-high boulder that the artist found in a Riverside County quarry, set on the walls of a 456-foot concrete trench. You walk down the slot and pass underneath the rock, which is the whole point: the stone seems to float above you.

Levitated Mass is open daily from sunrise to sunset, and LACMA closes the work whenever it is raining. On a hot afternoon the concrete reflects heat, so a morning walk is more comfortable.

LACMA has shown Rodin outdoors for half a century. The original B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Garden opened in 1975 with nine Rodin bronzes, and the Cantors were among the foremost Rodin collectors in the country. The garden has now returned in a reimagined 8,000-square-foot space on the north side of Wilshire, next to the Geffen Galleries, where the Rodins are paired with sculptures by Liz Glynn.

Look for the Monument to Honoré de Balzac, The Shade, The Prodigal Son and the Head of Pierre de Wissant from 1884 and 1885, which LACMA's photographs show in the foreground of the new garden. Nearby, Tony Smith's Smoke, conceived in 1967 and fabricated in 2005, stands 24 feet high and 48 feet long outside the Geffen Galleries, and you can walk right under and around it.

The new plazas have filled up quickly. Pedro Reyes's Tlali, an 18-foot sculpture of carved volcanic stone blocks, stands on the W.M. Keck Plaza, and Mariana Castillo Deball's Feathered Changes forms the floor of the plaza level of the Geffen Galleries. Alexander Calder's restored Three Quintains (Hello Girls) from 1964 now sits in a new reflecting pool on the east side of the campus.

On the south side, Jeff Koons's 37-foot Split-Rocker is planted with about 45,000 drought-tolerant plants and flowers, and Yoshitomo Nara's Miss Forest, his largest outdoor sculpture to date, stands at the southeast corner of BCAM. Robert Irwin's Primal Palm Garden holds more than a hundred palms, cycads and tree ferns, and Ai Weiwei's zodiac heads greet visitors on the Zev Yaroslavsky Plaza by the garage elevators. Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.'s 12 benches line the Kendall Concourse through December 1, 2026.

Inside, LACMA is open Monday, Tuesday and Thursday from 11 am to 6 pm, Friday from 11 am to 8 pm, and Saturday and Sunday from 10 am to 7 pm. It is closed on Wednesdays, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Adult tickets cost $30, or $25 for Los Angeles County residents; seniors and students pay $26, or $21 with county ID. Children 2 and under are always free, county residents 17 and under are free, and kids 3 to 17 from outside the county pay $15.

Two free windows are worth planning around. County residents get in free on weekdays after 3 pm, and everyone gets in free on the second Tuesday of each month. Timed slots can sell out, so LACMA recommends booking ahead. A Metro pass takes $2 off general admission.

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures at 6067 Wilshire Boulevard is open six days a week from 10 am to 6 pm, closed Tuesdays, with adult tickets at $25 and a reduced $18 after 4:30 pm. Across the street, the Petersen Automotive Museum at 6060 Wilshire is open daily from 10 am to 6 pm. The museum building at La Brea Tar Pits closed on July 6, 2026 for about two years of construction, but many outdoor areas of Hancock Park, including the tar pits themselves, remain open.

Address: LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036. Outdoor art is free; Urban Light is open around the clock and Levitated Mass from sunrise to sunset. Parking is in the Pritzker Parking Garage on 6th Street just east of Fairfax Avenue, open 5 am to 10 pm, for $24 or $16 after an 8 pm entry, with a 6-foot-10-inch clearance. The Metro D Line has stopped at Wilshire/Fairfax since May 8, 2026, but that station and Wilshire/La Brea are closed from October 23 through November 1, 2026, with a bus bridge in their place.