LACMA opens its Paul R. Williams retrospective Sunday with a house the architect designed for his own family. Built in 1952 in Los Angeles, the home gives the museum a way into a career that ranged from houses and hotels to public housing and civic landmarks. Drawings, photographs and furnishings help tell the story of a building that Williams could design for himself in a neighborhood that had until recently excluded Black homeowners.
Paul R. Williams: Architect for Living opens Nov. 15 in the Resnick Pavilion. It is the second of three Los Angeles exhibitions to draw on the Williams archive. USC Fisher Museum of Art already has a show devoted to housing. The Getty Research Institute opens a third in December, centered on the architect’s work for and with Black communities. All three will be open from Dec. 15 through March 13, subject to each museum’s operating hours.
LACMA follows the range of his practice
LACMA is the broadest starting point if you want to see how Williams approached different kinds of buildings. Its curators begin with the family home and then go back to his early practice. Williams earned his California architecture license in 1921. He became the first licensed Black architect in the western United States, according to the museum. The exhibition brings together rarely seen drawings and photographs and traces how his work changed as Los Angeles expanded around it.
From the Beverly Hills Hotel to LAX
Williams designed additions and renovations for the Beverly Hills Hotel, including its Crescent Wing. At Los Angeles International Airport, he worked on the joint architectural team behind the Theme Building, whose sweeping arches frame a suspended restaurant. The Los Angeles Public Library credits Williams alongside Pereira & Luckman Associates and Welton Becket & Associates for the building. The airport and hotel commissions show how far his practice had grown beyond the private homes that helped establish it.
The exhibition runs through May 31, 2027. LACMA lists Sunday hours of 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and sells timed museum admission. Standard adult admission is $25 for Los Angeles County residents with valid ID and $30 for adults from outside the county. The museum lists free general admission after 3 p.m. Monday through Friday for county residents. Metro’s D Line stops at Wilshire/Fairfax.
USC Fisher looks at who gets to live where
An Architect Considered follows Williams’s work on 31 multifamily housing projects. More than 60 archival items are shown alongside recent commissions. That format gives the plans a different kind of context: visitors can see how contemporary artists and architects respond to Williams’s work on shared housing, much of it in Los Angeles during the second Great Migration.
One example of the scale he worked at is Pueblo del Rio, a public housing development that he helped design with a team that included Richard Neutra. The Neutra Institute says the city’s housing authority commissioned it as affordable housing in central Los Angeles. USC Fisher is at 823 Exposition Blvd., offers free admission and lists regular hours of 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. The museum’s visitor page says it will close Nov. 21 for a USC football game. The show runs through March 13, 2027.
The Getty looks at institutions Williams helped build
Architecture Across the Color Line opens Dec. 15 at the Getty Center and runs through March 14, 2027. It puts Williams’s work for Black Angelenos at the center. His 1949 building for Golden State Mutual Life Insurance is one way to understand that part of his career. Getty says the company was the largest Black-owned insurer in the western United States and held a major institutional collection of African American art.
Getty and USC acquired the archive in 2020, after Williams’s granddaughter Karen Elyse Hudson cared for it. Its roughly 35,000 plans and 10,000 original drawings include projects that were never built. Getty admission is free with a timed reservation. The museum opens reservations six weeks in advance and charges separately for parking.
