Pompeii and the Roman Villa
All I can say is - wow, it was a great exhibit! I've been to some "special" traveling exhibits that were pretty small, i.e. really not that many artifacts, and you could see it in 20 minutes. Not this exhibit! It was large, well laid out and well spaced out. I think it took up pretty much the entire ground floor of one of the LACMA buildings. I usually don't do audio tours, but it was included in the ticket price and I thought I might actually listen to it this time. I did, and it was very informative - I definitely got more out of the exhibit because of the audio tour. It was very cool to see the originals of a couple of items that have been reproduced at the Getty Villa, as well as a lot of Roman glass from the Villa's collection that hasn't been on display! They had the wall panels from the entire dining room of a house, some of which has only relatively recently been discovered and rehabilitated. They had another huge panel from another house that was a garden on the wall, all birds and flowers and plants. Apparently a Roman "thing" was to make copies of Greek art, so there was a lot of that - with a Roman twist of course. Afterwards, I went to a lecture on that aspect of the Roman villa by the curator of the exhibit, who works at and is temporarily on loan from the Getty Villa. The woman from LACMA introduced him as being from their "sister museum", the Getty, and he stressed that far from being rivals they are often collaborators. Me, I think they're just saying that because they're cooperating on this exhibit ;-) They've always been rivals.
It didn't say this anywhere at LACMA, on anything they were giving out about the exhibit, but the Getty curator said that if you have a ticket or stub to the Pompeii exhibit, it gets you into the Getty Villa without a reservation, you can show up any time. I will definitely be checking that out!
Finally, let me just say - GO, you will love it!