Two hundred works, no frames

3 min readOct 26, 2026

By Tessa Langley, SPECTRA. Writer

One of America’s biggest museums just said yes to more than 200 artworks that live in code. Some are older than the internet. Some are Bored Apes.

On October 22, 2026, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) announced what it called “a landmark gift of historical and contemporary digital art.” Members of its LACMA Digital Leaders group and other donors, including the Mneme Foundation, have offered more than 200 works from their personal collections “over the next several years,” the museum said. The works have been offered; they arrive in stages.

From plotters to prompts

LACMA’s frontage on Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, in an undated photo. Photo: The Angels 2010, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The range is the story. LACMA says the gift runs from the mid-20th century to today, from “pre-internet era artworks” to “recent examples of works made with artificial intelligence,” and will let it “recontextualize digital art in the canon of art history.”

The early end belongs to people who made pictures with computers when computers filled rooms. LACMA’s press release lists historical works by “digital art pioneers” Rebecca Allen, Harold Cohen, Manfred Mohr and Vera Molnár.

Vera Molnár in 1996, in a video still with one of her computer drawings behind her. Her work is among the historical pieces offered to LACMA. Photo: Pantalaskas, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The newer end is a who’s-who of generative and AI art. The first donations include Refik Anadol, Nancy Baker Cahill, Dmitri Cherniak, Tyler Hobbs, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Trevor Paglen, Casey Reas, Jen Stark and Emily Xie, according to both outlets.

Yes, the apes

Then the NFTs. LACMA’s press release lists “Bored Ape Yacht Club (Yuga Labs)” and Twelvefold among the initial donations, and CryptoPunks (Larva Labs) among the additional gifts. It doesn’t say how many apes, or which ones.

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The givers come from that world too. The Digital Leaders group formed in 2023 and is chaired by Jeannie Vu and Jehan Chu, both outlets report. LACMA lists Yuga Labs CEO Figge and The Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget among its members. Yuga Labs owns Bored Ape Yacht Club.

Not LACMA’s first screen

LACMA’s original buildings on Wilshire Boulevard, September 1965, the year the museum opened there. Photo: George Garrigues (GeorgeLouis), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The museum calls the gift part of a “decades-long exploration of art and technology,” going back to its Art and Technology program of 1967, which paired artists including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg with corporations. In 2023 LACMA received works from the Cozomo de’ Medici collection, which pushed it to develop standards for acquiring, showing and conserving NFT-authenticated art, MyNewsLA reports. In 2022, Paris Hilton helped set up a fund to buy digital works by women artists.

Why we care

Museums are where arguments about art get settled. Taking a Vera Molnár and a Bored Ape in one gift says the fight over whether code can be art is over. The harder one has started: which of it lasts.

A painting needs a wall and a steady room. A digital work needs files, software and hardware that still run in 50 years. LACMA just signed up to keep more than 200 of them alive.

Credits

LACMA from Wilshire Boulevard (undated): The Angels 2010, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Vera Molnár (1996): Pantalaskas, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
LACMA on Wilshire Boulevard (Sept 1965): George Garrigues (GeorgeLouis), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.