Imagine you’re a hotshot young New York gallerist whose rapidly rising artist has been invited to show in a group exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). But between this fall’s booths at Frieze London and Art Basel Paris, a detour to Venice, and micromanaging your unpaid interns, you can only go for a day. So, tragically, there’s no time to fit in your regular visit to Erewhon, for which there’s simply no New York equivalent, especially because the $36,000 initiation fee for the Kith Ivy padel club that houses the city’s only Erewhon tonic bar is prohibitive in this art market.
Well, I have good news for the few who can relate to these circumstances: LACMA announced this week that the Erewhon pop-up in its new David Geffen Galleries will now serve as the museum’s permanent cafe. Housed in a glass box beneath Peter Zumthor’s sprawling $720 million “designed to disorient” structure, the Erewhon cafe faces out toward Alexander Calder’s recently restored fountain, “Three Quintains (Hello Girls)” (1964).
Calder’s tripartite mobile is also the inspiration for a new (and pre-distressed) capsule apparel collection and a signature LACMA smoothie, made from organic mango, mandarin, pineapple, strawberry, and lion’s mane. The beverage’s unnatural gray hue resembles the concrete of Zumthor’s design — only floating with blobs of Calderesque colors.
“This integration represents the perfect synergy between two brands inextricably rooted in Los Angeles culture,” Elizabeth Wiatt, senior vice president of strategic partnerships at LACMA, said in a press statement.
Much like the well-intentioned art world, whose ecosystem becomes more optimized but also more expensive and materialistic with each day, Erewhon is a far cry from the Taoist principles that guided its founders, Aveline and Michio Kushi, who established the first location in Boston in 1966. Today, the health-conscious “premium” grocery chain has become synonymous with a particular status-centric idea of LA, offering adaptogenic cocktails, celebrity-collaboration smoothies, and absurd oddities like a $12 cup of “Sacred Water.”
For a museum that recently hosted the star-studded unveiling of Ed Ruscha’s poster for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film Digger (2026), the Erewhon partnership is fitting. After all, it holds up a mirror to today’s world, wherein overpaying for a smoothie somehow makes it more delectable, and institutional and commercial industry partnerships made under the guise of “community” are normalized.
Look no further than Erewhon President Josephine Antoci’s euphemistic statement about the new LACMA cafe: “It’s a place for all to gather and make memories for years to come.”
