It took artist Michael Heizer 40 years to locate the right rock for his ambitious outdoor sculpture “Levitated Mass.” He finally found the 340-ton boulder in a Riverside County quarry—just a 3-hour-drive from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it will be placed on permanent display. (Feeling at home may be tough after the move, having lived in the quarry for millions of years.) Staying in sedentary character, the rock took 11 nights to make the 3-hour-journey to LACMA, averaging about 8 mph on a transporter the length of a football field.
The slow, circuitous southern California tour was a kindly grace note by the curators, who recognized that in its long life this would be the only trip the rock would ever take. The Museum claims the rock is “one of the largest megaliths moved since ancient times,” when, oddly, it was far more common to move giant boulders from place to place.