2015 MOCA REAL ESTATE ACQUISITION, 2018

Cameron Rowland's 2015 MOCA REAL ESTATE ACQUISITION (2018) was created for his solo exhibition D37, on view at MOCA Grand Avenue, October 14, 2018 – June 24, 2019. The work is a discreet inscription added to a previously blank section of the museum's donor plaque, acknowledging an $8.4 million "gift" from the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles (CRA)—a now-defunct municipal body once responsible for razing Bunker Hill in the late 1950s. Paired with the plaque is a steel-mounted caption (seen here), a hallmark of Rowland's practice, that supplies the historical context underpinning the piece.

That caption explains how Bunker Hill was redlined in the 1930s as a "blighted" area with a large population of Mexican and Asian residents, how the CRA later demolished the neighborhood's housing, granted MOCA a 99-year rent-free lease on the land in 1986, and then sold that land to the museum for just $100,000 in 2015—one month before a tax assessment valued it at $8.5 million. By reframing this transaction as philanthropy, Rowland exposes how racialised property devaluation and dispossession directly financed MOCA's founding and ongoing institutional wealth, using the museum's own donor-recognition conventions against itself.