Learning in La La Land? Seriously, we\u2019re not class clowning. With new museums, educational exhibitions, and erudite events popping up across the city, a brainier Tinseltown hopes to teach you and your family a thing or two about the arts and sciences.<\/p>\n
The latest arrival is Dataland<\/a>, a\u200ak\u200aa the Museum of AI Arts, located downtown at the Grand L.A., the Frank Gehry\u2013designed complex across from the Walt Disney Concert Hall. It claims to be the world\u2019s first museum of AI arts and should be open this spring (after delaying its planned 2025 launch).<\/p>\n Created by Turkish, Los Angeles-based designer and artist Refik Anadol \u2014 who caused a stir with his big-screen lobby installation \u201cUnsupervised\u201d at Manhattan\u2019s Museum of Modern Art \u2014 the space aims to ask some pretty big questions. <\/p>\n Dataland is the first museum for AI art. Museum of AI Arts<\/p>\n What\u2019s the relationship between human creativity and machine intelligence? Can the physical and the virtual intersect? What does it look like when you smash art, technology and data together on floor-to-ceiling screens? Do androids dream of electric sheep?<\/p>\n \u201cOne of my inspirations has been that question: what can a machine do with someone else\u2019s memories?\u201d the artist said in a 2024 interview, noting that his work is inspired by the film \u201cBlade Runner.\u201d<\/p>\n One installation is adapted from one of Anadol\u2019s first pieces, a so-called \u201cInfinity Room\u201d he dreamed up in 2015 at UCLA (where he teaches in the Department of Design Media Arts). <\/p>\n This new and improved Infinity Room with its immersive projections features AI-generated scents from the studio\u2019s Large Nature Model \u2014 a large language model fed on a diet of audio, visual, and environmental data from 16 rainforests around the planet. And that\u2019s just one of five galleries in the sprawling 25,000-square-foot space.<\/p>\n This gallery puts the \u201cart\u201d in artificial intelligence. Museum of AI Arts<\/p>\n For something old school with a fun new twist, haul your horde to the Natural History Museum<\/a>. In 2024, it got a radical $75 million redo \u2014 more chad-ifying leg-lengthening surgery than facelift. Now, the museum can stand tall with a new 60,000-square-foot, indoor-outdoor wing designed by Los Angeles\u2019 Frederick Fisher & Partners and Mia Lehrer\u2019s Studio-MLA, inviting Exposition Park locals to come explore.<\/p>\n You won\u2019t want to miss Gnatalie, a more than 75-foot-long, green-boned dinosaur, newly on display. It\u2019s the only one of its kind to be discovered. You, a Millennial raised on the \u201cLand Before Time,\u201d might call it a \u201clong neck,\u201d but your 6-year-old will know it\u2019s a sauropod.<\/p>\n At the same time, the museum put Barbara Carrasco\u2019s monumental 1981 mural, \u201cL.A. History: A Mexican Perspective,\u201d up for all to see. The work, created for the city\u2019s bicentennial, was censored at the time due to its depictions of low points in LA history \u2014 like the 1871 Chinese massacre, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the Zoot Suit Riots, and so on. We\u2019re grown up enough to take the heat these days.<\/p>\n Head to the expanded Natural History Museum for awesome dinos. Courtesy of NHM<\/p>\n Spend the afternoon taking in the museum\u2019s collection of 35 million objects and artifacts. Exhibitions on now include \u201cReframing Dioramas: The Art of Preserving Wilderness,\u201d which celebrates the 100th anniversary of the museum\u2019s vast diorama halls, including the opening of a hall that had been closed for decades.<\/p>\n Another old-school city icon is also flaunting fresh fun. <\/p>\n