NHM Next Project - Becoming Los Angeles | Natural History Museum of Los Angeles

How Did a Remote Pueblo Become a Regional Metropolis?   

In July 2013, we open the third in a series of new indoor exhibitions that mark our transformation. Becoming Los Angeles is a new 14,000-square-foot exhibit that will offer a unique take on Los Angeles’ stories — how the land and people interacted, and how those interactions affect the city and the region we live in today. Powerful storytelling, contemporary design, exceptional objects, and multi-media will allow visitors to interact with the exhibition, and by extension, contemporary Los Angeles, in real time.

Inside a quartet of galleries in the Museum’s newly-renovated 1913 and 1920s buildings, a visually striking canopy will symbolize the sweep of local history and lead visitors through the exhibit’s major sections or historical eras: the pre-Spanish landscape; Mission Era; Mexican Rancho Era; the early years of the American Period; the emergence of a new American city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and Los Angeles as a global city of the 21st century.