In Brief:
- On Oct. 22, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced an offer of more than 200 digital artworks, which will reach the museum over the next several years.
- Bored Ape Yacht Club (Yuga Labs) and Twelvefold are on the museum’s list of initial donations. CryptoPunks (Larva Labs) is among the additional gifts.
- The gift was led by LACMA Digital Leaders, a group whose members include Yuga Labs CEO Figge and The Sandbox SAND $0.05066 ▼ -3.6% (official site) co-founder Sebastien Borget.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is getting Bored Ape Yacht Club. LACMA named the collection on Oct. 22 when it announced a gift of more than 200 digital artworks. The pieces run from mid-20th century works made before the internet to recent ones made with artificial intelligence.
The press release puts “Bored Ape Yacht Club (Yuga Labs)” on its list of initial donations. It gives no count of apes and doesn’t identify the tokens.
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.@ApeChainHUBView on X ↗
A number came from the ApeChainHUB account. In a post on X, it said: “Eight BAYC & MAYC NFTs are joining the permanent collection at @LACMA.” The museum’s release names Bored Ape Yacht Club, but Mutant Ape Yacht Club doesn’t appear in it.
Where the gift comes from
LACMA Digital Leaders, or LDL, led the gift. According to the museum, members of the group and other donors, among them the Mneme Foundation, “have offered LACMA more than 200 works of digital art from their personal collections over the next several years.”
LDL started in 2023. Its chairs are Jeannie Vu, founder of Azura, and Jehan Chu, founder of Kenetic, and Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, guides the group. Members meet with curators, conservators and museum leadership to talk through how digital work gets collected, preserved and presented.
The membership list has several web3 names on it. Yuga Labs CEO Figge is a founding or current member, as are The Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget and SuperRare founder John Crain. Will Corkin, co-founder of SOMA.finance, and Jeffrey Ren, chairman and CEO of OK Group, are also members.
“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
Along with Bored Ape Yacht Club and Twelvefold, the initial donations have 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.
Historic works by Rebecca Allen, Harold Cohen, Manfred Mohr and Vera Molnár are part of the donations too. The museum calls those four digital art pioneers.
In the second group of offered gifts are 0xDEAFBEEF, Robert Alice, Kim Asendorf, Justin Aversano, Erick Calderon, Mitchell Chan, CryptoPunks (Larva Labs), William Mapan and Anne Spalter.
Vu and Chu, LDL’s co-chairs, said: “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.”
How the community reacted
ApeChainHUB described the gift as the payoff 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 wrote. It also congratulated @DigitalArtMove “and everyone who made this possible.”
Earlier digital acquisitions
LACMA has been adding digital art at a steady pace in recent years. In 2023, the Cozomo de’ Medici Collection gave the museum works by artists using blockchain, generative and AI-driven methods. According to LACMA, that gift required new standards for acquiring, exhibiting and conserving NFT-authenticated digital art.
Paris Hilton led a fund in 2022 to buy works by women working in digital art, Nancy Baker Cahill and Krista Kim among them. The museum has also teamed up with Cactoid Labs, an experimental curatorial and blockchain consultancy, on a project that asked digital artists to create work inspired by LACMA’s collection.
Recent exhibitions at the museum include “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982” in 2023 and Beeple’s “Diffuse Control,” which ran in 2025-26. LACMA’s collection holds 155,000 objects.
That history traces back to the museum’s Art and Technology program. It started in 1967 and paired artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg with major corporations.