MOLAA Tickets

On Alamitos Avenue in Long Beach, a low-slung modernist building holds the only museum in the United States devoted entirely to modern and contemporary Latin American art. The Museum of Latin American Art, always shortened to MOLAA, fills its galleries with painting, sculpture, photography and installation work by artists from across Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. The sculpture garden out back is the quiet surprise of the visit: outdoor works set among paths and shade, a space for slowing down between the indoor galleries. Admission is $15 at the door, the museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays, and it sits about twenty-five miles south of downtown Los Angeles, which makes it a day trip for most LA visitors.

What Is MOLAA And Where Is It?

MOLAA is the Museum of Latin American Art, at 628 Alamitos Avenue in Long Beach, California, and it is the only museum in the United States dedicated exclusively to modern and contemporary Latin American art. General admission is $15, and the museum is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.

The museum opened in 1996 and has spent the decades since building a permanent collection that spans work by artists from across Latin America, with a particular strength in Mexican, Cuban, Caribbean and South American art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The collection covers painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography and new media, and rotating exhibitions draw from both the permanent holdings and international loans.

The building itself went through a major expansion in the 2010s, which added gallery space and reworked the entrance sequence. The result is a compact, easily walkable museum: a handful of indoor galleries arranged over one level, plus the outdoor sculpture garden that wraps around the back of the building. Visitors who have been to The Broad in downtown Los Angeles will find MOLAA a very different scale of experience, closer to a focused single-artist or single-region museum than a sprawling encyclopedic institution.

Long Beach is the key to understanding the museum's character. The city has one of the largest Latino populations in California and a long civic tradition of supporting Latin American cultural programming. MOLAA sits in the East Village Arts District, a walkable neighborhood of studios, small venues and restaurants a short drive or a longer walk from the waterfront. The museum's programming, from exhibition calendars to its annual festival events, is built around that community relationship, and it shows in what hangs on the walls.

For visitors comparing art destinations across Los Angeles County, MOLAA occupies a distinct slot. It is not a free museum like The Getty Center or The Getty Villa, which waive admission and charge only for parking. It is a modestly priced, tightly focused institution whose reason to visit is the collection itself, and it rewards travelers who make the drive south with art they will not see anywhere else in the county.

How Much Do MOLAA Tickets Cost?

General admission to MOLAA is $15 at the door. That is the verified door price for this museum, and it is the figure to plan around. Tickets are sold through the museum's own ticketing page, which is the only place this site points readers to buy.

MOLAA is what this directory calls an official-link museum: there is no third-party ticket product for it, and no reseller platform carries Los Angeles museum inventory. Tiqets, Klook and Trip.com were all checked directly and none of them sell a Los Angeles museum ticket, so the museum's own site is the honest and only route. The ticket page lives at molaa.org/visit, and that page also carries the current details on concession pricing, member admission and any special exhibition tickets, which this directory does not quote because the figures change with each exhibition calendar.

The base price table looks like this:

A few honest notes on the price. First, $15 sits in the middle of the Los Angeles museum range: cheaper than the $30 LACMA charges most visitors, the same as the Skirball Cultural Center's door price, and more than the free admission at The Broad, MOCA Grand Avenue or the Hammer Museum. Second, MOLAA is not part of any free-admission policy this directory has verified. There is no standing free day on record for it, and unlike LACMA or the Natural History Museum it has no verified resident free window. If a free visit is the goal, the honest options are the free museums listed elsewhere on this site, each of which comes with its own catch, usually parking.

Third, on passes: Go City Los Angeles is the real multi-attraction pass for the region, and there is no Los Angeles CityPASS covering museums, whatever older guides claim. Southern California CityPASS is a theme park product, not a museum pass. This directory has not verified whether MOLAA is included in Go City's current attraction list, so do not plan around it; check the pass inventory directly before assuming anything.

What Are The Opening Hours And Closed Days?

MOLAA is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. It operates Wednesday through Sunday, and the exact opening and closing times for each day are published on the museum's own visit page at molaa.org/visit, which is the authoritative source this directory points to.

The two-day closure is the single most important planning fact on this page. Many Los Angeles museums close one day a week, and a fair number close Mondays, but MOLAA's Monday-and-Tuesday closure matches only a handful of institutions in this directory, among them the Fowler Museum at UCLA and the Wende Museum in Culver City. Anyone building a Long Beach itinerary around a Monday aquarium-and-museum day will arrive at a locked door, so the closed days belong at the top of the plan, not the bottom.

The current hours, including any early closings for private events or holiday variations, are on the museum's visit page. Hours at small and mid-sized museums shift more often than at large institutions, and special events, exhibition installations and festival weekends can all change the schedule, so a same-week check is worth the thirty seconds it takes.

The at-a-glance picture for planning:

One scheduling advantage worth knowing: because MOLAA is open on Mondays, it can serve as a substitute on the day many other museums in the region are dark. The Getty Center, The Broad, the Hammer Museum and the Griffith Observatory all close on Mondays, so a Monday visit to Long Beach, combining MOLAA with the open-daily Aquarium of the Pacific a couple of miles away, is a genuinely useful piece of itinerary arithmetic for LA travelers.

Where Do You Park At MOLAA?

Parking at MOLAA is paid, and this directory does not carry a verified figure for the price. The museum's own site is the source for current parking rates and any validation policy, and no number should be assumed from other Long Beach venues.

Parking is this directory's core subject for a reason: across Los Angeles, the museum ticket and the parking cost are two separate decisions, and travelers who budget only for admission routinely underestimate the day. At the Getty Center and the Getty Villa, both of which charge $25 per car, dropping to $15 after 3pm, the parking costs more than triple what MOLAA's $15 admission costs. MOLAA's parking situation is smaller in scale, but the same rule applies: confirm before you go.

What can be said with confidence is the geography. MOLAA sits on Alamitos Avenue in the East Village Arts District of Long Beach, a street-level urban neighborhood rather than a parkland campus. That means the parking picture is street and lot parking in a mixed residential and commercial district, not a single gated structure like the Getty's hilltop garage. Availability varies with neighborhood activity, and museum-adjacent lots may fill on event days, so arriving with a fallback plan, or checking the museum's parking guidance before setting out, is the sensible move.

Long Beach also runs its own municipal parking system, with city lots and structures scattered through downtown and the East Village area, and rates that are set by the city rather than by the museum. The museum's visit page is the place to confirm which lots it points visitors toward and what the current rates are. This directory will not quote a figure it has not verified, and it will not carry a parking price over from another museum, because that is how wrong numbers end up on museum guides.

The honest summary for a driving visitor: budget for paid parking on top of the $15 admission, treat the total as the real cost of the visit, and check the official site for the current rate on the day of travel. For anyone comparing the full cost of LA art museums, the free-admission institutions are not automatically cheaper once parking is counted, and MOLAA's modest admission plus modest neighborhood parking can compete with a free museum that charges $25 to park.

How Do You Get To MOLAA Without A Car?

MOLAA is reachable by public transit, with LA Metro rail and bus services connecting to Long Beach, and journey planning is best done through the official trip planner at metro.net. The museum is roughly 25 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, so transit time is substantial and worth planning in advance.

The A Line, Metro's longest light rail route, runs from downtown Los Angeles south to Long Beach, and it is the backbone of any car-free trip to this part of the county. Long Beach itself operates its own local bus network, and the combination of the regional rail line and the local system covers the distance from the transit stop to the museum's Alamitos Avenue address. Current schedules, fares and connections are on metro.net, which is the authoritative source for LA County transit and the one this directory links to.

The practical reality is that MOLAA is a day-trip museum for most visitors staying in central Los Angeles, Hollywood or the Westside. The transit journey each way can take well over an hour from the main hotel districts, which makes the museum a half-day commitment at minimum even before gallery time is counted. That is not an argument against going, it is an argument for planning: pair MOLAA with something else in Long Beach, most obviously the Aquarium of the Pacific at Rainbow Harbor, which is open daily and sits about two miles west of the museum.

For visitors weighing whether the trip is worth it against staying in central LA: the honest answer is that MOLAA's collection is unique in the United States, and no museum on Museum Row or in downtown Los Angeles covers the same ground. The Getty Center and The Getty Villa hold European antiquities and art; The Broad holds contemporary work with a different collecting lens. If modern and contemporary Latin American art is the interest, the drive or the rail ride south is the only way to see a museum built around it, and the day-trip framing is exactly how this directory treats it.

How Long Should A Visit Take, And What Should You Not Miss?

Plan on two to three hours for MOLAA, which is enough to see the permanent collection galleries, the temporary exhibitions and the outdoor sculpture garden at a comfortable pace. The museum is compact by big-city standards, so it fits a half day rather than a full one.

The visit naturally divides into three parts. The indoor galleries hold the permanent collection of modern and contemporary Latin American art, with painting, sculpture and works on paper that rotate through the display spaces. The temporary exhibition galleries change several times a year and are worth checking on the museum's site before traveling, because they are often the strongest reason to time a visit to a particular month. The sculpture garden, the outdoor portion of the campus, is where the pace slows: sculptural works set along garden paths, and a space that rewards the last half hour of a visit rather than the first.

First-time visitors should read the gallery plan at the entrance and work back toward the garden, since the museum's layout makes it easy to miss the outdoor works entirely if you exit the way you came in. Photography policies, guided tour availability and any docent-led schedule are published by the museum and change with the exhibition calendar, so the visit page is the reference for those details on the day.

Pairing suggestions for the rest of the day: the Aquarium of the Pacific, two miles west at Rainbow Harbor, is open daily and is the obvious companion stop, especially on a Monday or Tuesday when MOLAA is closed and the aquarium is not. Downtown Long Beach's waterfront, restaurants and shoreline paths fill out a full day without another museum ticket. Travelers who want to extend the art theme back into central LA can plan a separate day for The Broad or the Getty museums, but the two should not be squeezed into the same excursion; the distances in Los Angeles make that a mistake, and the day-trip museums in this directory, MOLAA, the Huntington and the Norton Simon, each deserve their own unhurried block of time.

One last planning note: because the museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays, weekend days carry the visitor load, and a Wednesday or Thursday visit typically means quieter galleries and easier parking. That is a general pattern rather than a promise, but for a museum of this size, weekday mornings are the calmest experience on record.

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