The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

Activities: Education Programs (adults, children and families); Temporary Exhibitions; Traveling Exhibitions.

Originally a hardware store and subsequently a city warehouse and service garage for municipal vehicles, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (originally known as MOCA at the Temporary Contemporary) opened in September 1983 as a temporary exhibition space while the MOCA at California Plaza was being constructed. The vast scale of the space proved so suitable for exhibiting all types of contemporary art, however, that MOCAs board of trustees voted to make it permanent. MOCA collects, exhibits and interprets art created since 1940 in all media and preserves it for future generation. Changing selections from its permanent collection are on view throughout the year. The museum presents more than 20 exhibitions, including historical and thematic shows, one-person retrospectives, newly commissioned projects and works by emerging artists. These feature not only painting, sculpture and drawing, but also video, photography, film, music, dance, performance, design, architecture, and new forms that combine various disciplines. Many of the exhibitions are part of an active exchange program with other nationally and internationally prominent museums. MOCAs permanent collection now numbers more than 5,000 works, including masterpieces of abstract impressionism and pop art. The collection includes works by Diane Arbus, John Baldessari, Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis, Robert Frank. Ann Hamilton, Robert Irwin, Jasper Johns, Lee Krasner, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Joan Miro, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Sarah Seager, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, Alexis Smith, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol, among many others. MOCA maintains two sites: The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and MOCA at California Plaza (see separate listing). A single admission fee is valid for both museums on the same day. There is shuttle bus services between the two buildings.

Temporary Exhibitions.

Publications: collection catalogue; gallery guides; research publications.

The museum is located at The J. Paul Getty Center, a 6-building, 110-acre campus designed by Richard Meier in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Extensive gardens include a 3-acre ( entral Garden designed by Robert Irwin. The Museum offers permanent, temporary, and special exhibitions drawn from its extensive permanent collections. The permanent collection is divided into seven curatorial departments: antiquities, paintings, drawings, sculpture and works of art. photographs, manuscripts, and decorative arts. She Museum’s collection of classical antiquities, temporarily housed at the Museum during the renovation of the Getty Villa at Malibu, includes sculpture, Greek vases. Greek and Roman gems, and luxury wares such as Hellenistic silver and Roman glas.~ The Gett> Museum’s collection of pictures from the 13th to the 19th century includes works by uoh artists as Fra Bartolommeo. Breughel the Elder, Cezanne. Correggio, Daddi, Dossi, Ensor, Gainsborough. Gericault, Liotard. Mantegna. Pontormo, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van de Cappelle, and van Gogh. The drawing collection is especially strong in Old Master drawings. Since the early 1990s the collection-; focus has shifted toward acquiring drawings made in the 1800s and 1900s. Included in the collection are works by Cezanne, Cortona. Leonardo da Vinci, Daumier, Degas, Gainsborough, Holbein. Piranesi Rembrandt. Turner, van Gogh, and Watteau. The permanent collection of European sculpture, spanning the period from the Middle Ages to the end of the 19th-century, has strengths in bronze sculpture, such as Cellini’s “Satyr”: Northern European sculpture, such as Adriaen de Vriess Juggling Man”; and French 18th- and 19th-century works, such as Jean Baptiste Carpeauxs “Bust of Jean Leon Gere me”. The Photograph Collection, formed in 1984. is the only curatorial department with works from the 20th- century. The collection includes 25.000 individual prints ranging in date from the 1830s to the 1960s, thousands of daguerreotypes, and about 30,000 stereographs and cartes-de-visite. While maintaining a comprehensive collection, the department concentrates on securing works by master photographers. It is especially rich in examples dating from the early 1840s, including major holdings by William Henry Fox Talbot, David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, and Hippolyte Bayard. Since 1984. the department has concentrated on photographs produced by masters of the first half of this century. Especially notabie among these are images by Gertrude Kiisebier, Frederick Sommer, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand. Doris Llmann, and Edward Weston. There are also comprehensive collections of manuscripts and the European decorative arts. The former Getty Museum, now styled The Getty Villa in Malibu. will display the Museums collection of classical antiquities. It is closed for renovations and will reopen in 2001.

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

Activities: Exhibitions (all media); Gallery Tours and Artist Talks (in conjunction with exhibitions).

Publications: exhibition catalogues.

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions is a non-profit interdisciplinary artists organization that presents arts and ideas and serves as a forum for an evolving dialogue between artists and their audiences. The organization mounts solo and group exhibitions of innovative works in a wide variety of media, including conceptual art, temporary installations, and site-specific, multi-disciplinary work, as well as new media. Its galleries have served as the proving grounds for new artists and art forms, and its programs have provided the impetus for dialogue about contemporary arts and culture. It does not maintain a permanent collection.

Elizabeth Hoffman, II. Huby, 1996. acrylic, varnish, wooden frame, 29 x 20 inches. Los Angeles Art Association. Photograph courtesy of Gallery 8256/LAH| Los Angeles, California.

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