In Brief:
- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art said Oct. 22 that it has been offered more than 200 works of digital art, and the gift will arrive over the next several years.
- The museum’s list of initial donations includes Bored Ape Yacht Club (Yuga Labs) and Twelvefold. CryptoPunks (Larva Labs) appears among the additional gifts.
- LACMA Digital Leaders led the gift. The group’s members include Yuga Labs CEO Figge and The Sandbox (official site) co-founder Sebastien Borget.
Bored Ape Yacht Club is headed for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The museum named the collection in its Oct. 22 announcement of a gift of more than 200 digital artworks, ranging from mid-20th century pieces made before the internet to recent works made with artificial intelligence.
LACMA’s press release lists “Bored Ape Yacht Club (Yuga Labs)” among the initial donations. It doesn’t say how many apes are included or which tokens they are.
Years of collecting, building, and believing in the cultural value of NFTs led to this historic moment for digital art and the Ape community.
Eight BAYC & MAYC NFTs are joining the permanent collection at @LACMA.
Congrats @DigitalArtMove and everyone who made this possible.
The ApeChainHUB account gave a number. “Eight BAYC & MAYC NFTs are joining the permanent collection at @LACMA,” it said in a post on X. The museum’s release names Bored Ape Yacht Club but not Mutant Ape Yacht Club.
Who is giving the works
LACMA Digital Leaders, known as LDL, led the gift. Members of the group and other donors, including the Mneme Foundation, “have offered LACMA more than 200 works of digital art from their personal collections over the next several years,” the museum said.
LDL was formed in 2023. Jeannie Vu, founder of Azura, and Jehan Chu, founder of Kenetic, chair the group, and LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan guides it. Members meet with curators, conservators and museum leadership on how digital work is collected, preserved and presented.
Several web3 names are on the membership list. Figge, CEO of Yuga Labs, is a founding or current member, and so are Sebastien Borget, co-founder of The Sandbox SAND $0.0507 ▼ -3.6%, and John Crain, founder of SuperRare. Other members include Will Corkin, co-founder of SOMA.finance, and Jeffrey Ren, chairman and CEO of OK Group.
“Digital art belongs within the long arc of art history, not apart from it,” Govan said. “With LDL’s generosity and leadership, we are building a collection that traces a trajectory of digital arts, launching us toward an innovative future where we can connect digital art to the art of every era and culture represented in our galleries.”
The artists
Besides Bored Ape Yacht Club and Twelvefold, the initial donations include works by Refik Anadol, Nancy Baker Cahill, Dmitri Cherniak, Tyler Hobbs, Carlos Luna James, Maya Man, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Sarah Meyohas, Trevor Paglen, Casey Reas, Monica Rizzolli, Rafaël Rozendaal, Jen Stark, Emily Xie, Lu Yang, Yatreda and Sarah Zucker.
The donations also include historic works by Rebecca Allen, Harold Cohen, Manfred Mohr and Vera Molnár, whom the museum calls digital art pioneers.
The second group of offered gifts includes 0xDEAFBEEF, Robert Alice, Kim Asendorf, Justin Aversano, Erick Calderon, Mitchell Chan, CryptoPunks (Larva Labs), William Mapan and Anne Spalter.
“Beginning in the 1960s with its Art and Technology program, LACMA has led a critical dialogue around artists experimenting with technology. LDL, the Mneme Foundation, and other generous donors are privileged to continue this legacy and accelerate the global conversation around the LACMA collection,” said Vu and Chu, LDL’s co-chairs.
Community reaction
ApeChainHUB called the gift the result of years of work by holders. “Years of collecting, building, and believing in the cultural value of NFTs led to this historic moment for digital art and the Ape community,” the account said. It also congratulated @DigitalArtMove “and everyone who made this possible.”
Earlier digital acquisitions
LACMA has added digital art steadily in recent years. In 2023, the Cozomo de’ Medici Collection gave the museum works by artists using blockchain, generative and AI-driven methods. The museum said that gift required new standards for acquiring, exhibiting and conserving NFT-authenticated digital art.
In 2022, Paris Hilton led a fund to buy works by women working in digital art, including Nancy Baker Cahill and Krista Kim. LACMA has also worked with Cactoid Labs, an experimental curatorial and blockchain consultancy, on a project that asked digital artists to make work inspired by the museum’s collection.
The museum’s recent exhibitions include “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982” in 2023 and Beeple’s “Diffuse Control,” which ran in 2025-26. LACMA has a collection of 155,000 objects.
All of it goes back to the museum’s Art and Technology program, started in 1967, which paired artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg with major corporations.
