by Mayté Rodríguez Cedillo and Fernando Favela   Arts and Culture Travel  ·  BajaTraveler.com

She was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926. One hundred years later, the city that made her is honoring her with the most significant cultural retrospective of her life and work ever mounted — and the world is following suit. From a landmark exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to sold-out shows at the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, 2026 has become, unmistakably, the year of Marilyn Monroe.

For the luxury traveler, this centennial offers something rare: a reason to experience Los Angeles not as a stopover, but as a cultural destination of the first order — and an invitation to trace the Monroe phenomenon across continents.

The Academy Museum: A Portrait of Control

The anchor of the centennial year is Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon, which opened today, June 1st, 2026 at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and runs through February 28, 2027. Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Renzo Piano, the museum itself — 50,000 square feet of exhibition space housed in the restored 1939 Saban Building and a soaring spherical addition — is one of Los Angeles’ most architecturally compelling spaces. The exhibition it now hosts is among its most important.

The curatorial argument is deliberate and long overdue: Marilyn Monroe was not a product of the Hollywood machine. She was its most sophisticated operator. Curated by Sophia Serrano, the exhibition presents hundreds of original objects — posters, portraits, production documents, personal letters, and materials that have never been publicly displayed — to document the extraordinary degree to which Monroe shaped her own public image from within the classical studio system. Visitors encounter not a myth, but a working artist in full command of her craft.

The wardrobe component alone justifies the visit. Screen-worn costumes span the full arc of her career, from a dress worn in Love Happy (1949) to pieces from Something’s Got to Give (1962), her final and unfinished film. Among the highlights: two Orry-Kelly creations from Some Like It Hot (1959), and the rarely exhibited pink dress by William Travilla from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) — a garment so culturally embedded it barely needs context. The exhibition is made possible by CHANEL, and the elegance of that patronage is entirely appropriate.

Los Angeles: Building a Marilyn Itinerary

The Academy Museum provides the intellectual center of any Monroe-focused visit to Los Angeles, but the city offers a richer geography for those willing to explore it. Brentwood, where Monroe spent her final years and where she died in August 1962, remains a quiet, affluent neighborhood whose discretion seems fitting. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a short drive from the museum, holds works by Andy Warhol and other artists whose practice was transformed by Monroe’s image. Hollywood’s own history — the studios, the Walk of Fame, the Chateau Marmont — takes on new resonance after an afternoon spent inside the Academy’s galleries.

The museum itself rewards extended engagement. Two state-of-the-art theaters host screenings, and the Fanny’s restaurant and café — named for pioneering costume designer Fanny Brice — offers an excellent post-exhibition lunch or dinner. The Sidney Poitier Grand Lobby and The Walt Disney Company Piazza are free and open to the public, making the museum’s exterior spaces accessible even to those who haven’t reserved tickets in advance. Advance online booking is required for exhibitions; general admission runs $25 for adults, $19 for seniors, $15 for students, and is free for visitors 17 and under and for California EBT cardholders.

A Global Phenomenon

Los Angeles may be leading the centennial, but it is not alone. In London, the National Portrait Gallery opened Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait on June 4, 2026 — an exhibition built around the full arc of her photographic life, including a rarely seen series of 432 images taken by Allan Grant at Monroe’s Brentwood home just one day before her death in 1962. Only a handful were ever published in Life magazine; the full series, appearing here in public for the first time, offers something closer to the private Marilyn than almost any artifact in existence.

In Paris, the Cinémathèque Française dedicated its spring season to Monroe, tracing her Hollywood ascent from 1946 to 1962 through film, wardrobe, and portraiture. The exhibition closed in late July — but for travelers planning ahead, the National Portrait Gallery in London runs through September 6, and the Academy Museum through February 28, 2027, making Los Angeles the most enduring destination on the centennial circuit. Switzerland added an immersive experience complete with projection mapping and archival footage. Heritage Auctions mounted a sale of handwritten letters, watercolor paintings, and private effects — material, by their account, that had never entered the commercial market.

What emerges from this global constellation of events is not nostalgia. It is a collective reconsideration — curators, scholars, and institutions around the world choosing the same centennial moment to argue that Marilyn Monroe deserves to be understood on different terms. Not as a tragedy. Not as a symbol. As an artist who understood image-making with a sophistication her era rarely credited her for, and whose instincts the twenty-first century is finally prepared to appreciate.

Centennial Events at a Glance