CULVER CITY, California – The Bhagavad-Gita Diorama Museum is not easy to find. It’s hidden in a hallway in the Hare Krishna Temple complex on a side street in Culver City. Although a sign outside announced that the museum was open, the front door was locked one autumn morning; it took five minutes for a worker to arrive and unveil his jumble of 11 dioramas depicting the history of Hare Krishna.
The Martial Arts History Museum, 22 miles away by car in Burbank, is more conducive to a visit – it’s on Magnolia Boulevard, one of the main thoroughfares in the San Fernando Valley – but at 2,000 square feet it’s so cramped that the museum turned down buses of schoolchildren who wanted to see, among other things, a headband worn by Ralph Macchio in “The Karate Kid Part II.”
“This is the first and only museum of its kind, can you believe it?” said the chairman, Michael Matsuda. “The only one in the world that covers all martial arts.”
Over the past decade, Los Angeles has grown into a global arts center, known for such prominent museums as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Broad, and most recently, the Academy Museum of the Motion Picture. But less visible is an extensive and important network of smaller museums, aimed at a niche audience interested in topics ranging from olive cultivation to the Garifuna people of the Caribbean.
These hundreds of museums reflect the idiosyncrasies and specialized interests of their founders while providing a glimpse into the ethnic, cultural, and historical diversity that has come to define Southern California.
“These alternative spaces have transformed LA,” said Jordan Karney Chaim, a San Diego-based contemporary art historian.
The variety and breadth of museums in Los Angeles reflects the overall expansion in the art scene here that began in the 1970s, when there was more space and rents were lower.
Many are little known for a reason: they have odd hours, hardly advertise their existence or are the passion projects of one or two people, with no paid staff. And many of them are not trying to appeal to the mass market. There are museums dedicated to skateboarding, tattoos, cars, bunnies, neon, sneakers, aviation, citrus trees and the Salvation Army.
Todd Lerew, the director of special projects at the Los Angeles Library Foundation, has spent the past eight years trying to visit every museum in the region — 760, by his estimate. He has recorded his first 650 visits on a spreadsheet and is preparing a book about his discoveries.
“I approach all my interests obsessively,” says Lerew, who often drives as much as 200 miles a day. “If I want to know something, I want to know everything.”
His estimate reflects an expanded definition of Los Angeles — in this case, the entire metropolis, from the Pacific Ocean to the Mojave Desert — and an expanded definition of the word “museum,” which includes a one-walled exhibit that traces the history of the original bakery in what is now the Helms Bakery District, a collection of designer shops and restaurants. But if inaccurate, his findings testify to the concentration of museums, scholarly and idiosyncratic, that art leaders consider part of Southern California’s cultural core.
“LA is a very large, sprawling city, and it’s not surprising that museum spaces can be found in neighborhood neighborhoods all over the city,” said Patricia Hills, a retired professor of art and architecture at Boston University. “Many ethnic groups have their own pride, and galleries and museums in the public space are a way to express their culture and creative output.”
Some museums, unknown and located in remote parts of a large country, struggle to get people through the door. Claiming to be the only Armenian museum on the west coast, the Ararat-Eskijian Museum, located in a sprawling residential care home for elderly Armenians in Mission Hills, is fortunate to draw 25 people a week. The exhibition space on the ground floor displays paintings, jewelry, ceramics, religious artifacts and rugs, including some made by Armenian orphans.
The museum has hosted lectures on Armenian history to try and increase visitor numbers, but the truth is that the audience is made up of people who come across it while visiting relatives.
“People will say, ‘I’m going to the Getty,'” says Marguerite Mangassarian Goschin, the museum’s director. “But ‘I’m going to the Eskijian?’ This is a very remote area.”
There are 1,100 museums across the country accredited by the American Alliance of Museums; 76 of them are in California, 10 of which are in the city of Los Angeles. But that’s only a small fraction of the 30,000 museums that the Alliance estimates exist across the country. Most have not submitted to the accreditation process, which requires a formal structure — such as a strict mission statement — which can be daunting for these freewheeling organizations.
“We support museums that are not accredited,” said Laura L. Lott, the alliance’s president. “Many of them have great social value.”
Some, without compromising their dignity, are vanity projects: A museum dedicated to Horace Heidt, the bandleader and television and radio personality who died in 1986, is run by his son Horace Heidt Jr. in the Horace Heidt Estates, a rental community on an old farm in Sherman Oaks.
“There’s a lot of history here,” Heidt said, showing off a collection of photographs, radio program recordings, sheet music, and records. The museum charges no admission and depends on the tenants of the property for funding. “If we hadn’t let them live here, we wouldn’t be able to pay the rent,” Heidt said.
But some museums that operate under the radar of mainstream Los Angeles have cult followings. The Museum of Jurassic Technology, with its door opening onto Venice Boulevard in Culver City, defies both description and categorization. (It presents itself as “an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.”) It was recently filled with people navigating narrow corridors and making their way to the roof – for tea and a visit to the bird sanctuary.
Yet most of these museums operate on the fringes of the Los Angeles art scene and depend on the perseverance of their founders. Matsuda, the president of the martial arts museum, sold his house to buy the building for a museum dedicated to a subject that had fascinated him since childhood. The result is an exhibition of swords (feel free to handle them; their edges have dulled over time), karate uniforms, and detailed timelines tracing the evolution of jujutsu.
“It’s more than punching and kicking,” Matsuda said. “The goal is to talk about the positive influence of the Asian-American community and its impact on America.”
To achieve this better, the martial arts museum has started looking for a larger space; Matsuda said he wanted to raise $5 million for one that can host additional events and house more than 30 children. “We need a bigger space so we can bring the kids in because we’re standing still,” said Matsuda.
Lerew said he understood why the Martial Arts History Museum needed to expand and hoped it could do so without participating in what he called the museum-industrial complex.
“There’s something about Southern California’s culture of attracting creative people and those with unique interests that don’t fit anywhere else,” he said. “The scale and scope and development in Southern California – the explosion in the early 20th century – has resulted in hundreds of smaller communities wanting to portray and depict their own communities.”