#MOCA MUSEUM GRAND AVE ARCHIVE#
The site-specific installation takes participants through an immersive archive of the artist’s black cultural experiences from the perspective of her childhood home in South Central L.A.Ī short jaunt to the neighboring Little Tokyo unveils the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, an old warehouse that was renovated by legendary architect, Frank Gehry. Additionally, Lauren Halsey: we still here, there, will be available until September 3rd. Until September 3, 2018, visitors will experience Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin, an exhibition of 100 works by three photographers who reveal glimpses of nocturnal lifestyles, unsettling portraiture and self- reflection. Hotel Figueroa guests can easily navigate to the MOCA Grand Avenue location, where the building designed by Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki, is wrapped in pastel-hued murals by Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Since 1979, these entities have acquired some of the most important postwar art by Rothko, Warhol, Pollack and notable California artists. Jack Shakely was president of the California Community Foundation from 1980 to 2004.For an expansive cultural journey, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), is defined as the only artist-founded institution in Los Angeles with a permanent collection of 7,000 objects and exhibitions spread throughout three locations: MOCA Grand Avenue, Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and MOCA Pacific Design Center. Make it fun to go to MOCA again, and sell that Grand Avenue location to somebody who doesn’t mind living and working in a dungeon.
Reopen the Geffen Contemporary and fix it up. But it deserves far better than the Grand Avenue site. MOCA has a fantastic contemporary art collection that will only get better, much better, over time. One has to wonder, was the Grand Avenue site chosen because it would be good for MOCA? Or was it chosen because MOCA was thought to be good for what would become the Grand Avenue project? The entrance was softened a bit when the sandwich shop opened, but people eventually got the willies, not to mention gritty baguettes, in what looked to all the world like an abandoned hand-ball court.ĭid anybody really want to put MOCA in that Grand Avenue basement? But what the heck: It was free, and maybe the parking could sort itself out later. The first thing you hit after descending the stairs is the inevitable swirl of dust, leaves and litter that is part of the design vortex of the entrance courtyard. But all the whimsy and sass are snatched away when you make your way down into that windowless cavern to enter the museum. Intuitively sensing its depressing entrance, MOCA added something whimsical up top: Claes Oldenburg’s giant pocketknife sculpture and a sassy gift shop. The Stygian descent into the Grand Avenue location promises nothing of the sort. The Geffen Contemporary, which used to be known as the Temporary Contemporary (a very cool name), was the original site of MOCA and promised a quirky, slightly unfinished adventure that made visiting the museum fun. Going down into that place was so depressing there should have been a sign on the entrance: “Abandon hope, all ye who nosh here.” The long-defunct Triforium food court in downtown Los Angeles learned that the hard way.
You descend into subways and sewers, but you should never have to do so at art museums - or anything festive for that matter. The only art museum I visited at which I had to descend to enter - the only one - was MOCA. In my 25 years as president of the California Community Foundation, I was privileged to visit scores of art museums in every major city in the United States - and not just the usual suspects in places such as New York and San Francisco, but in Tacoma, Fort Worth, Miami, Richmond and Oklahoma City, among many others. In the ongoing flurry of news articles and opinion pieces in The Times about the future of Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art, nobody seems willing to admit that the location MOCA is closing for at least six months - the Geffen Contemporary near Little Tokyo - is the wrong one.
0 kommentar(er)
