Late afternoon light slants through the fourth-floor windows of the Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery, catching the streamline curves of what was once, in 1939, the May Company department store. Renzo Piano’s spherical addition rises just beyond, a silver moon anchoring Wilshire Boulevard. Inside these walls, in the fall of 2027, a century of Mexican and Mexican American filmmaking will unfold across five galleries — a story the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has been quietly building toward since it opened its doors in 2021.

Cinelandia: Celebrating Mexican American Cinema is not simply an exhibition. It is the museum’s most ambitious attempt yet to place Mexican and Mexican American artistry at the center of Hollywood’s own story — and, for travelers who make the pilgrimage to Miracle Mile, it turns a single museum visit into the anchor of a full day along one of the most culturally dense stretches of pavement in the United States.

A Landmark Exhibition Takes Shape
Opening September 25, 2027, and running through July 23, 2028, Cinelandia is organized by associate curator Sophia Serrano with assistant curator Emily Rauber Rodriguez and curatorial assistant Josue Lopez. The show is guided by a twelve-person advisory panel drawn from both scholarship and studio work — animator-director Jorge Gutiérrez, writer-director Gregory Nava, UCLA professor Chon Noriega, and LACMA curator Rita Gonzalez among them — a signal that the museum is treating this not as a themed retrospective but as a serious act of film-historical reclamation.
Museum director Amy Homma has described the exhibition as an effort to surface the richness and resilience of Mexican American and Mexican experience through the lens of cinema, while Serrano has spoken of assembling more than a century of work — from the silent era to today — to show how film has functioned as a space for cultural expression and resistance. It is a framing that gives the exhibition weight well beyond costume cases and prop displays.

Five Galleries, A Century of Cinema
The exhibition unfolds chronologically and thematically: the entangled relationship between Hollywood and Mexico during the silent and classical eras; the filmmaking that emerged from the Chicano Movement of the 1960s; the rise of Chicano narrative cinema in the 1980s and ’90s alongside the influence of New Mexican Cinema; the enduring fandom around genre film; and a final gallery on contemporary animated, sci-fi, and fantasy work drawing on Mexican culture.

Hundreds of rarely seen costumes, props, posters, and photographs will trace that arc through titles spanning nearly a century — the Spanish-language Dracula of 1931, Salt of the Earth, La Bamba, El Norte, Selena, Y Tu Mamá También, and Coco among them. Seeing these works placed in direct conversation, rather than scattered across a century of film history, is where the exhibition’s real argument lives.

The Miracle Mile Corridor: A Day of Cultural Immersion
What makes a Cinelandia visit worth building a full day around is geography. The Academy Museum anchors Museum Row, a walkable stretch of Wilshire Boulevard where the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the La Brea Tar Pits, and the Petersen Automotive Museum sit within a few minutes of one another on foot. LACMA’s holdings in Latin American and Spanish colonial art offer a natural extension of Cinelandia’s themes; the La Brea Tar Pits ground the same stretch of Wilshire in tens of thousands of years of natural history, still actively excavated in the open air; and the Petersen, three blocks west, traces Los Angeles’ own car culture — the industry that quite literally built the boulevard travelers are standing on.

Taken together, the corridor gives visitors a rare kind of day trip: cinema history, natural history, and design history, all within a single, pedestrian-friendly stretch of Central LA — with the Original Farmers Market and The Grove close enough for a lunch break between museums.

Planning Your Cultural Pilgrimage
The Academy Museum is open six days a week, and timed-entry tickets are recommended well ahead of any visit tied to a major exhibition opening. Cinelandia will be the museum’s seventh large-scale exhibition in the Katzenberg Gallery, following recent runs including Jaws: The Exhibition and The Horror Show — a track record that suggests early booking will matter once dates draw closer. Travelers planning a 2027-2028 Los Angeles itinerary around film, art, or Latin American culture would do well to build the visit in now.

✦ BAJATRAVELER® TAKEAWAY
Cinelandia is the rare museum exhibition that justifies restructuring an entire Los Angeles itinerary around it. Pair it with LACMA, the La Brea Tar Pits, and the Petersen for a full day on Museum Row — this is cultural travel with genuine substance, not a detour.

Plan Your Visit
Cinelandia: Celebrating Mexican American Cinema opens September 25, 2027 in the Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, 6067 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, and runs through July 23, 2028. Open six days a week, 10am–6pm.
→ Visit academymuseum.org │ Press inquiries: museumpress@oscars.org