MOCA ACQUIRES KARA WALKER’S UNMANNED DRONE, ANNOUNCES 158 ACQUISITIONS IN 2025
Kara Walker, Unmanned Drone, 2023, Bronze, 156 x 132 x 56 in. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Purchase with funds provided by Beth Swofford by exchange. © Kara Walker. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen.
LOS ANGELES, CA–Today, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) is thrilled to announce that it has acquired Kara Walker’s monumental sculpture Unmanned Drone (2023), currently on view in the landmark exhibition MONUMENTS at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick. In addition, over the course of 2025, MOCA expanded its renowned permanent collection with the addition of 158 works by 106 artists.
Ann Goldstein, Interim Maurice Marciano Director, stated: “With the acquisition of Unmanned Drone, we are honored to steward this epic and historic sculpture by Kara Walker, which is at the core of our acclaimed current exhibition, MONUMENTS. A searing and crucial statement about the legacy of post-Civil War United States, it is a profound work for this moment–and for the ages. This sculpture caps a year of extraordinary growth for MOCA’s collection in 2025, welcoming in works by artists with both longstanding and newly developed connections to the museum. Together, these acquisitions reflect our belief that our collection must be both responsive to the present and enduring for the future. MOCA extends its deepest gratitude to our Trustees and the many generous supporters who made these gifts and purchases possible.”
Cynthia Daignault, Twenty-Six Seconds, 2024. Oil on linen. Overall: 162 1/2 × 297 1/2 in. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Purchase with funds provided by Pete and Michelle Scantland. © Cynthia Daignault. Photo by Jeff McLane.
Major works by Jacqueline Humphries, Mike Kelley, Julie Mehretu and Nairy Baghramian, Shizu Saldamando, and Mary Weatherford were added to the collection in 2025. The acquisitions feature 50 artists new to the collection, including Jonathas de Andrade, Leila Babirye, Meriem Bennani, Paul Chan, Cynthia Daignault, Ali Eyal, Sawako Goda, Yaron Michael Hakim, Kate Mosher Hall, Suzanne Jackson, Nicole Miller, and Ulla Wiggin, among others.
Shizu Saldamando, San Cha and Prisk, 2024, From the Embrace series, (2009–ongoing), Ballpoint pen on found twin-sized bed sheet, Dimensions variable. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Purchase with funds provided by Karen Hillenburg and Liana Krupp.
Several acquisitions were featured in recent exhibitions or were made by artists with important connections to the institution. These include a significant environmental sculpture by Olafur Eliasson that was part of the artist’s recent Geffen exhibition OPEN; work by Takako Yamaguchi, who was the subject of a MOCA Focus exhibition in 2025; an important media installation by Paul Pfeiffer, Red Green Blue (2022), co-acquired with the Brooklyn Museum of Art; a key Mike Kelley installation from the “Day Is Done” series, hitherto not represented in MOCA’s collection; works by Cynthia Daignault and Shizu Saldamando that were standouts in Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art; and a suite of pencil drawings by Henry Taylor, the artist’s earliest extant works of art, which featured in his 2022 retrospective.
MOCA’s acquisition of Walker’s Unmanned Drone extends this tradition of bringing important exhibited works into the collection. Walker’s work is a centerpiece of the acclaimed MONUMENTS exhibition, currently on view at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick. Called “brilliant” by the Los Angeles Times, the “standout achievement of MONUMENTS” by New York Times, and “the artwork of the year” by Vanity Fair, Unmanned Drone is a radical reimagining of Charles Keck’s 1921 bronze monument to the Confederate general “Stonewall” Jackson, which stood in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a century before it was decommissioned by the city in 2021. The original monument, depicting Jackson on his horse “Little Sorrel,” was then re-deeded to the Los Angeles non-profit The Brick, which had proposed to give the bronze to Walker for her creation of a new work of art, becoming Unmanned Drone. Walker’s sculpture is a monstrous assemblage of man and horse, turning a once-heroic commemoration of the Lost Cause into a visceral, yet deeply considered reflection on questions of authorship and American history and myth.
“The expansion of MOCA’s collection this year reflects a sustained and deeply collaborative effort to think critically about what it means to build a museum collection in the twenty-first century,” said Clara Kim, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs. “With the remarkable support of our Trustees and patrons, we have been able to acquire works that not only fill important historical gaps but also advance conversations about contemporary art, locally and globally.”
CONTINUED IN FULL RELEASE
View the complete list of 2025 acquisitions.