After a long and widely publicised period of turmoil, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles, is on the rise again. “It’s a brand-new day,” says MoCA’s director, the French curator Philippe Vergne.
A few years ago, MoCA was in crisis. After almost a decade of mounting deficits, its endowment was devastated by the 2008 financial meltdown. Eli Broad, a long-time donor and the first chairman of the museum’s board, contributed millions of dollars to keep the institution afloat.
The New York-based art dealer Jeffrey Deitch was brought in as director by a board desperate for a financial saviour. But Deitch’s focus on pop culture and celebrity proved to be at odds with MoCA’s artist-centred culture.
The museum’s respected curator Paul Schimmel departed (and has now gone into partnership with the commercial gallery Hauser & Wirth). Then MoCA’s artist-trustees John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Catherine Opie and Ed Ruscha resigned from the board. “We weren’t heading in the right direction,” says former board president Jeffrey Soros. “The model was broken and we had to change it.”
After Deitch’s resignation in 2013, the board rallied round to rebuild the endowment. By the end of that year, it stood at $100m, and the board’s sights were now set on the $200m mark.
The museum, which opened in 1983, is a rare institution. It was founded by artists and its permanent collection of almost 7,000 works is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary art collections in the world. Its best aspects are now re-emerging, under the leadership of Vergne, who spent the five years before his arrival early in 2014 as the director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York, and the sophisticated gaze of chief curator Helen Molesworth, who came to MoCA from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 2014.
“MoCA is an institution with a great history and a wonderful future,” Kruger says. She, Opie and Baldessari are also back on the board.
Art enthusiasts in Los Angeles are impressed by Molesworth’s scholarly curatorial vision. “You have to reach for the highest in each person who visits the museum, instead of the lowest. Helen Molesworth is doing that,” says Geoff Tuck of the city’s art-scene bulletin Notes on Looking.
Since she arrived in Los Angeles, Molesworth has been visiting artists’ studios and digging around in the museum’s permanent collection. “It’s been a great deal of fun,” she says. Her approach mixes art-historical rigour with playful openness. “Los Angeles is a place where people feel a lot of permission to experiment.”
Homegrown artist Mark Bradford, who is also on MoCA’s board, welcomes the arrival of Vergne and Molesworth. “They’re out there listening, adapting their programme,” he says. “Maybe they’re not bogged down in the politics of Los Angeles, and that gives them fluidity and bravery.”
New collaborations are already establishing connections beyond the walls of the museum’s three locations: the Grand Avenue building designed by Arata Isozaki, directly across the street from the new Broad museum; the Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo, renovated by Frank Gehry; and the Pacific Design Center, in West Hollywood.
“The challenge is to see the museum today beyond its bricks and mortar, using the construct of the city to be in multiple locations, because that’s the way the city functions,” Vergne says. One solution is a nascent partnership between MoCA and the independent Underground Museum, run by the painter Noah Davis. Borrowing works from the museum’s collection, Davis will organise shows at his space in the West Adams/Crenshaw neighbourhood, bringing art to a diverse, working-class part of the city.
The partnership reflects MoCA’s new enthusiasm for expanding beyond traditional museum spaces to connect with the vast city. This summer, its main building hosted a survey organised by Molesworth of the classic range of contemporary art, drawn from the permanent collection, and Double Conscience, a multimedia collaboration between the music video director Kahlil Joseph and the hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar about life in Compton, a district known as the home of the seminal rap group N.W.A.
“We are excited to be implementing the idea of being a museum for our time in a city of our time,” Vergne says. “I don’t know what art is going to be like in 25 years. We have to base the museum on things we don’t know yet, and in a city I don’t really know yet. That’s exciting.”