LACMA and L.A. County Bicycle Coalition Join Up

Museum Offers Free Admission to Bikers and Bus Riders for Earth Day Celebration 

Photo by Rodrigo Mejia

Bikers at LACMA

  With the heat dialed down on Sunday, riders from West Hollywood headed to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for a celebration of Earth Day and a chance for free admission. 

The ride was hosted by the West Hollywood Biking Coalition (WeHo), a regional arm of the Los Angeles County Biking Colation (LACBC), and invited families to test the back roads of the west side before coming to stop at LACMA. 

Once there, cyclists from the morning ride dismounted to join hundreds of fellow Angelenos who were treated to a complimentary admission--provided they arrived by bike or public transportation. 

The partnership between LACMA and LACBC--an umbrella bike advocacy group started by Joe Linton and Ron Milam in 1998, showcased the kind of wide-breath cooperation that biking has been stirring in the last few years, not dis-including the 100,000-person ride known as CicLAvia.  

"You can cover more distance, you see more, and you’re more open to your environment than if you were in a car," said Francois Bar, Associate Professor at USC on riding through the city. 

Well maybe not actual distance, biking does provide for the distinct leap in the quality of the journey up and through Los Angeles. For LACMA, that was part of the appeal of the partnership. 

Photos by Rodrigo Mejia
LACBC and LACMA stations

Their slug for the Earth Day celebration read: "Because EARTH without ART is just 'EH'" 

In looking to hook Angelenos and drag them into the museum, biking seemed the perfect lure and the theme of riding in the city repeated itself throughout the courtyard of LACMA, under the watch of the 340 ton hunk of granite hauled over from Riverside County for Michael Heizer's installation, "Levitated Mass"--the over 200-foot-tall boulder was draped in a green tarp.

Stations started from the 6th Street entrance, where a bicycle valet, headed by green-vested members of LACBC, tethered every shape of bike to a coral. Some of the activities included making spoke cards and various paint workshops, all of which drew a steady orbit of children while their parents took a breather after their ride. 

LACMA also hosted a few tours and looped a showing of Michael Wolfgang Bauch's movie, "Riding Bikes with the Dutch." 

The movie, debuted in 2010 at the Bicycle Film Festival in Long Beach, compares the overwhelming bike culture in Amsterdam to the car-centered culture of Southern California. Bauch, who grew up in Long Beach, was nearly trampled by the obscene amount of riders in Amsterdam, something which propelled him to shoot his film.

"The first time I stepped off the train in Amsterdam I was literally speechless. As soon as I set foot on the ground I was almost run over by a mob of bikes," said Bauch in an interview with Dutch in America.com. 

"I turned up and, to my amazement, there was a three-level structure dedicated to just parking bicycles. Everyone from three years to 93 seemed to be tooling around the city on two wheels. This was too much to take in with just my own eyes. I needed to share this with everyone I could and this is why I made my film."

After the event, visitors gathered their bikes and headed onto Wilshire Boulevard, complete with missing chunks of asphalt and cars squeezing cyclists off the road.