The Museum of Contemporary Art

09/10/2026

Democracy Sessions at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in collaboration with Wild Up, featured in the Los Angeles Times "Shows to Catch this Fall in SoCal" by Mark Swed and Eloise Rollins-Fife.

Tickets available here: moca.org/events/democracy-sessions-oliver-leith-garland

09/09/2026

Happy Birthday, California.

On this day in 1850, California joined the union to become the 31st US state.

Image credit:

Jerry McMillan, "California," 1978. Sulfide duotone of black and white photograph. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Gift of Jonathan Starr.

09/09/2026

FORM FINDS FUNCTION: The Museum of Contemporary Art's 1984 logo, designed by Chermayeff & Geismar, has always been brilliantly simple: a circle, a square, a triangle, and a C. For our recently relaunched website, BASE Design gave two of those shapes a job.

The circle and square move to the bottom of the screen as thumb-friendly navigation, then expand into a digital grammar across menus, content, locations, pages, and scrolls. The logo stops sitting there and starts working.

Turns out the old visual language had plenty left to say.

moca.org

09/09/2026

FORM FINDS FUNCTION: The Museum of Contemporary Art’s 1984 logo, designed by Chermayeff & Geismar, has always been brilliantly simple: a circle, a square, a triangle, and a C. For its recently relaunched website, base_design gave two of those shapes a job.

The circle and square move to the bottom of the screen as thumb-friendly navigation, then expand into a digital grammar across menus, content, locations, pages, and scrolls. The logo stops sitting there and starts working.

Turns out the old visual language had plenty left to say. 

Case study at link in bio. 

Credits:
Mirek Nisenbaum Mirek Nisenbaum
Vivian Valentin Vivian Val
Mariana Solís Mariana I. Solís
Jeffrey Waldman Jeffrey
Andrey Starkov Andrey Starkov 
Masha Basyrova Masha
Volha Trehubava
Artem Lyustik Artem Lyustik
Olya Sidorchenko
Thomas Hervé Thomas Hervé Studio
Leah Gauquie 
Daniel Koppich Daniel Koppich
Siarhiej Lisoŭski The studio of Sergey Lisovskiy

Music by Lander & Adriaan Lander & Adriaan

09/08/2026

This week is unusually humid in LA, and while art is usually protected from environmental changes like humidity, one artwork currently on view at MOCA Grand Avenue relies on it. Hans Haacke’s 1963 work “Condensation Cube” uses the heat and moisture from viewers’ bodies to change the environmental conditions around the cube, which directly influence the amount of condensation within. As temperature and light conditions fluctuate, condensation forms and trickles down the walls of the box. A change as subtle as the entrance of a gallery visitor affects, however imperceptibly, the action within the cube, demonstrating that in the simplest act of our being, we impact the world around us.

On view in “The Expanding Field: MOCA’s Collections from the 1940s to 1970s,” at MOCA Grand Avenue through Sept 20, 2026.

Image credit:

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchase with funds provided by the Acquisition and Collection Committee. © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunset, Bonn.

09/04/2026

Getting ready for the long weekend with an out of office.

Image credit:

Edward Ruscha, "OOO," 1970. Lithograph. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Gift of Ronald Wilkniss.

09/04/2026

READ ALL ABOUT IT.

‘Cecilia Vicuña: Quipu of Encounters: The Dream of Water' and 'Julian Charrière’ featured in the Los Angeles Times "16 ambitious art shows to see in and around L.A. this fall" by Leah Ollman.

The exhibitions open November 15, 2026 at MOCA Grand Avenue.

Expect a rich fall season of ambitious, revelatory shows across Los Angeles museums this fall, including blown glass, taxidermy and landmark retrospectives of work by Doyle Lane, Laura Andreson, Roy DeCarava and Mavis Pusey.

09/03/2026

ARTNIGHT TONIGHT!

MOCA will be open until 8pm with FREE admission. Join us, The Broad, Dataland, and more neighbors as we celebrate DTLA.

https://www.moca.org/events/september-dtla-artnight

08/28/2026

This September, the multidisciplinary performance, “Beat of the Traps,” created by Mike Kelley, Anita Pace, and Stephen Prina (seen in the video clip above) will be presented in LA for the first time since its debut in 1992.

This collaborative work assembles a dance performance, a percussion recital, a rock drum solo, a music fanatic’s vaudevillian monologue about rock star excess, and the number one song on Billboard’s Hot 100 at the time of the performance.

Click the link in bio for tickets.

Anita Pace
Mike Kelley Foundation
Stephen Prina
Jon Baldwin
Freeda Electra
ButchNorton
MB Gordy
Abbott Alexander
Alex Sloane

08/26/2026

Introducing the Modernica x Barbara Kruger collaboration benefiting MOCA.

This collaboration brings one of contemporary art’s most recognizable visual languages into the realm of functional design through two limited-edition works: the Case Study® Fiberglass Barbara Kruger Side Chair, Love It – Shove It, and the Case Study® Fiberglass Barbara Kruger Aiko Table, Want It – Need It.

Learn more here: https://modernica.net/collections/barbara-kruger

The Modernica x Barbara Kruger collection may be purchased at Modernica.com and the MOCA Store at 250 South Grand Avenue, LA, CA 90012.

08/24/2026

"The Expanding Field: MOCA's Collection from the 1940s to 1970s" features eight major paintings by Mark Rothko. Rothko’s transcendent, luminous color-field paintings are considered a cornerstone of Abstract Expressionism in the US. On view in the current exhibition are works from 1949 to 1960—the first years of Rothko’s “mature” practice, defined by his signature juxtaposition of textured, rectangular forms.

"The Expanding Field" is on view at MOCA Grand Avenue until September 20, 2026.

Image credits:

Installation views of "The Expanding Field: MOCA’s Collection from the 1940s to 1970s," April 18, 2026–September 20, 2026, at MOCA Grand Avenue. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Photo by Jeff McLane.

08/21/2026

"Alexander Apóstol, Regime: Dramatis Personae" will open at MOCA Grand Avenue on September 20, 2026.

Alexander Apóstol is an artist known for his photographs, videos, and installations in which he explores the entanglement of art and systems of political power, as well as how they mirror and distort each other. For most of his career, the artist has focused on Latin American geometric abstraction as a case study to interrogate the ideological foundations of modernism.

"Regime: Dramatis Personae" (2017–18) is a series of black-and-white portraits depicting archetypal figures appearing on the stage of populist and authoritarian governments.

Learn more: https://www.moca.org/exhibitions/alexander-apostol-regime-dramatis-personae

08/20/2026

If you're driving down Sunset Boulevard, look up! The new billboard for our upcoming exhibition just went live.

"In These Times: Recent Acquisitions at MOCA" opens Sept 20, 2026, at MOCA Grand Avenue with FREE admission.

For more information, visit moca.org

Image credit:

Alex Israel, "Movie Theaters," 2024. Acrylic on canvas. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchase with funds provided by Karyn Kohl. ©Alex Israel.

08/19/2026

Celebrate with a look at highlights from MOCA’s photography collection. 👉

Harry Gamboa Jr.’s “First Supper (After a Major Riot)”documents a guerilla-style street performance by the experimental Chicanx artist collective Asco. Bedecked in carnivalesque costumes, donning Día de los Muertos–like masks and makeup, and surrounded by theatrical props, Patssi Valdez, Willie Herón III, Humberto Sandoval, and Gronk held a banquet on the median strip of East LA’s main artery, Whittier Boulevard. It was the site of the riot referred to in the title: on August 29, 1970, twenty-five thousand people marched in the Chicano Moratorium, protesting the war in Vietnam and the disproportionate number of Mexican American casualties. What began peacefully ended with police brutality, with dozens injured and three dead. For months after the Chicano Moratorium, East LA was under unofficial martial law; public gatherings were forbidden. With “First Supper (After a Major Riot),” Asco sought to reclaim public space, insisting on their visibility in a spirit of celebration.

Image credit:

Harry Gamboa Jr., “First Supper (After A Major Riot),” 1974/2012. Fujigloss Lightjet print. Edition of ten. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchase with funds provided by the Drawings and Photography Committee.

The myth of Narcissus, a beautiful demigod so besotted by his own reflection in a pool of water that he remained fixed in place until his death, is usually understood as a caution against vanity and pride; here Laura Aguilar imagines different possibilities. Mirrored in the water like Narcissus, she instead evokes a self-absorption of profound peace and belonging, a body tenderly held by nature, and distance from a world that discourages self-love for so many.

Image credit:

Laura Aguilar, “Untitled Landscape,” 1996. Gelatin silver print. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Gift of Gary and Tracy Mezzatesta.

This photograph by Ken Gonzales-Day belongs to his ‘Searching for California’s Hang Trees’ series, an intensive research- based project for which the artist spent six years scrolling through microfilm, reading historical accounts of the “fron

08/18/2026

Robert Rauschenberg featured taxidermied chickens, hens, roosters, and other stuffed birds in several of his pioneering Combines (hybrid artworks that blurred painting and sculpture). A key work featuring stuffed fowl is “Untitled,” c. 1954, seen here. For a long time, Rauschenberg believed that the hen standing in the lower right corner of this Combine was of the American breed Plymouth Rock. Rauschenberg was so convinced of the hen’s heritage that he often referred to the almost eight-foot-tall work as “Plymouth Rock.” When scholars and onlookers began to question the chicken’s breed, Thomas Buehler of Rauschenberg’s studio, through much research and consultation with bird experts, determined that this bird is instead one of America’s oldest chicken breeds: the Dominique hen. The biggest visible difference between the two breeds is the shape of their comb (the red crest on the top of the chicken’s head).

“Untitled,” c. 1954, is currently on view in “The Expanding Field” at MOCA Grand Avenue (through Sept. 20, 2026). An altar-like structure that incorporates the taxidermied chicken alongside a pair of men’s shoes, paint, and photographs, this piece was considered by Rauschenberg to be the first real Combine painting, with its medium-defying incorporation of found objects and personal mementos.

Image credit:

Robert Rauschenberg, “Untitled,” c. 1954. Oil, graphite, crayon, paper, canvas, fabric, newspaper, photographs, wood, glass, mirror, tin, cork, and found painting with pair of painted leather shoes, dried grass, and Dominique hen on wood structure mounted on five casters. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Panza Collection.

08/17/2026

🚨New Exhibition Announcement!

“In These Times: Recent Acquisitions at MOCA”

Opening September 20, 2026, at MOCA Grand Avenue. This survey exhibition highlights artworks added to the museum’s collection over the last five years. The exhibition includes work by Ed Bereal, Louise Bonnet, Andrea Bowers, Justin Caguiat, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Christina Forrer, Charles Gaines, Sawako Goda, Jacqueline Humphries, Alex Israel, Suzanne Jackson, Tomashi Jackson, Larry Johnson, Liz Larner, Julie Mehretu and Nairy Baghramian, Rebecca Morris, Kathleen Ryan, Diane Simpson, John Sparagana, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Henry Taylor, Vincent Valdez, and Ulla Wiggen, among others.

Learn more: moca.org/exhibitions

Image credit:

Hilary Pecis, “Silverlake Hillside,” 2025. Acrylic on linen. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchase with funds provided by Shari Glazer.

Image credit:

Yolanda Lopez, “Las Santas Locas,” from the series ‘Life in the Mission,’ 1979/2021. Digital print from black-and-white photograph. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchase with funds from the Drawings and Photograph Committee.

Image credit:

Julie Mehretu and Nairy Baghramian, “TRANSpaintings (green ecstatic),” 2023-2024. Ink and acrylic on monofilament poly mesh. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchase with funds provided by Sean and Alexandra Parker.

Image credit:

Sawako Goda, "Automatism Series: Toe Sensation," 1993. Pastel crayon on paper. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchase with funds from the Drawings and Photographs Committee.

08/14/2026

When your outfit matches the art...