Today LA County residents and visitors have access to a vast array of cultural and recreational opportunities. Here you can experience Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Page Museum, William S. Hart Ranch and Museum.
If you are looking for something special and uforgettable, then visit The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) immediately. This LA County Museum premieres the special exhibition Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship. Organized by LA County Museum Curator of Pre-Columbian Art Virginia Fields with Dorie Reents-Budet of the National Museum of Natural History, the exhibition will be on view before it travels to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of ArtThe exhibition presents new discoveries in Maya archaeology, art history, and hieroglyphic writing that describe the appearance of kingship among the ancient Maya and its cultural and philosophical foundations.
This exhibition is an important element in The LA County Museum ongoing commitment to bring the art of Latin America to Los Angeles. In the last few years they have made significant strides in demonstrating commitment to Latin American art, through major acquisitions, vital collaborations, and important exhibitions, in the Center for the Art of the Americas. Lords of Creation is the next step in the Latino Arts Initiative.
Lords of Creation explores the development of divine kings and their roles in the emergence of a complex urban society 2,000 years ago in the Maya region (southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras). In divine kingships, ruling elites utilized notions of cosmic order to sustain the structure of their earthly domains. Divine kingship is found among ancient civilizations throughout the world in Asia and Southeast Asia, Egypt and West Africa, Mesopotamia, and Europe, but it remains an unexplored process in the ancient Americas.
The exhibition traces the appearance of sacred kings to the Middle Preclassic Period (900-400 BC) among the Olmec, who first portrayed their rulers in monumental art with the attributes of their divinities, especially the Maize God. Human rulers engaged with supernatural beings through ritual performance, transformative acts in which the rulers took on these attributes to signify their own divine powers. The exhibition of the LA County Museum examines the role of such transformations as the source of authority for the earliest Mesoamerican kings.
To draw connections between the development of Maya kingship and other aspects of their civilization, it's possible to say that Maya kingship, sustained by the wealth produced by maize agriculture, led to the development of an elaborate royal court society with astronomers, scribes, and artists among the nobility. One focus of the exhibition is on the origins of hieroglyphic writing and how its earliest appearance seems to be in the form of captions, which provided the names and titles of kings and stated their ownership of precious objects.
The exhibition concludes with the royal journey after life, when kings entered the celestial realm of venerated ancestors.