In 2018, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) signed a 35-year lease on a vacant 84,000-square-foot bus depot in South Los Angeles Wetlands Park as part of its plan to establish city-wide satellites. Yesterday, the museum officially dissolved that agreement with the city’s parks department.

“In 2019, LACMA determined it would not pursue that project due to high cost of seismic and structural retrofit and informed the City of L.A.,” a LACMA representative told me via email. Yesterday’s memo marked the final formality in killing the endeavor, which LACMA originally expected to cost $25 million.

The museum’s ongoing interest in expansion is both practical and ideological. For nearly a decade, it’s been hard at work on its Mid-Wilshire campus’s new David Geffen Galleries, the first U.S. museum project by acclaimed Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. In 2020, LACMA demolished four of its headquarter’s gallery buildings to make way for the Zumthor structure—a $715 million project, according to the museum’s numbers—leaving limited room to exhibit its 150,000-artwork collection.

Fortunately, after eight years of spirited dialogue and extensive re-designs, Zumthor’s non-hierarchical hall will open for a member and donor preview next Spring, three years after its original deadline.

A rendering of the David Geffen Galleries. Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner / The Boundary. Courtesy of Building LACMA.

Meanwhile, LACMA has already established several satellites around L.A. In 2007, the museum opened its first off-campus location at Charles White Elementary, situated between Koreatown and Downtown L.A., and began offering public hours on weekends from 2018. Since 2017, LACMA has also shared artwork with East Los Angeles College.

These initiatives, paired with LACMA’s offer to share its collection with the forthcoming Las Vegas Museum of Art, have helped get their pieces in front of viewers while construction at their campus continues. LACMA’s recently-abandoned bus depot was, after all, intended to serve as both a storage facility and an exhibition space. LACMA’s satellite efforts also aim to share its art with wider audiences around L.A., a city where traffic tends to separate communities.

“You could literally run a space in South Los Angeles, and then run a space in San Fernando Valley,” LACMA director Michael Govern said in 2017. “There would be no overlap in audiences between Wilshire Boulevard, San Fernando Valley, and South Los Angeles. None. You think about it: ‘Oh, do you have to send your collection abroad to have it seen by different people?’”

An aerial a view of the wetlands park where LACMA hoped to build. Courtesy of the Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners, May 2017.

LACMA originally pledged to offer public programming at its South Los Angeles Wetlands Park location within 18 months of inking the lease. They proposed “social justice-themed school tours” and a teen-tour guide training course—both of which would supplement ongoing programs in nearby Willowbrook, which include workshops at A C Bilbrew Library and a 2022 AR monument presentation at Earvin “Magic” Johnson Park, in partnership with Snapchat’s parent company.

Although LACMA is leaving South Los Angeles Wetlands Park, it remains committed to South L.A. “We are in the planning phase for a project with the County of L.A. for a museum facility at Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson Park,” the museum’s representative replied when I asked whether its enthusiasm for satellites locations was waning, adding that LACMA “continues its commitment to programming in South L.A.”

“And no,” she said of the museum’s terminated lease, “it’s not related at all to the David Geffen Galleries.”