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LACMA Has A Fun Art Club For Adults With Scavenger Hunts And Meet-Ups
Make new friends, enjoy art (Photo by Michael Locke via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr)
LACMA is launching a new program that allows its members to come to fun, bi-weekly events to make new friends and enjoy art. LACMA Local is a new program, engineered to encourage art lovers to meet up, hang out and do fun stuff together—kind of like an extracurricular art club, but for adults. The $40 fee provides access to meet-ups that occur at the museum every other Saturday, starting February 20. At each of these meetings, the attendees will be split up into groups of 8 to 12 and partake in an activity. The hope is that these people will forge friendships and find a community around LACMA and its offerings.
The first event is called Seasons. The groups will each go on self-guided tours of specific pieces that each relate to a particular season, and will then check out Rain Room (that's an extra $10).
On March 5, the event is titled Scavenger. In this case, participants will go around the museum and respond to a series of art-related prompts. On March 19, attendees will explore and sketch work from the Frank Gehry exhibit before creating Gehry-inspired models of various structures.
The idea is that each event will be casual, fairly uncomplicated, hands-on, fun and conducive to conversation and friendship. Some meetups take place in the early evening, while others take place in the afternoons or mid-morning. If you and your new friends really hit it off, maybe you could head over to Ray & Stark's afterwards for a cocktail or a bite.
Kristen Shepherd, associate VP of audience strategy and services at LACMA, told LACMA's blog Unframed that she was inspired by local residents who visit the museum frequently, but who never become museum members:
I thought it could be that these frequent visitors—who are clearly LACMA fans—are looking for a way to belong, but their needs are different. LACMA’s membership team conducted surveys to gain some insight into what this section of our audience was looking for, and we learned something very interesting: there’s a whole group of people that likes what LACMA does and loves coming to the museum, but isn’t interested in the traditional benefits of membership (such as free admission). They want to connect with people and be part of a community without a big commitment.
LACMA Local is $40 by itself, or can be tacked onto a traditional membership for $25.
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