Collection: MOCA’s First Thirty Years

To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of MOCA’s grand opening in 1989, the museum presents Collection: MOCA’s First Thirty Years, MOCA’s largest ever installation of works from its world-renowned permanent collection. Installed across all gallery spaces of both MOCA Grand Avenue and The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, the exhibition featured more than five hundred artworks by over two hundred artists and marks the reopening of The Geffen Contemporary after a brief hiatus. Collection is organized chronologically and provides a comprehensive survey of Western art from 1939 to 2009, demonstrating the breadth of MOCA’s holdings. The MOCA Grand Avenue display includes work from the first four decades of the collection, tracing their development from abstract expressionism in the 1940s and 50s to pop, minimal, and conceptual art in the 1960s and 70s. The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA features work from the 1980s to the 2000s, highlighting a proliferation of concepts, forms, and media made by established and emerging artists from around the world.

Collection includes works by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Alberto Giacometti, Mark Rothko, Diane Arbus, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Claes Oldenberg, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Edward Ruscha, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Anselm Kiefer, On Kawara, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Renée Green, Nan Goldin, and many more.

Collection: MOCA’s First Thirty Years is organized by Paul Schimmel, Chief Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.