Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA, Los Angeles)

The place

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum in Los Angeles, founded in 1979 and dedicated to works created from the 1940s to the present. Its main site stands on Grand Avenue in the Bunker Hill neighborhood downtown, in a building designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki and inaugurated in 1986. The building is distinguished by its red sandstone cladding and its partially buried volume, of which only four of the seven levels emerge above the street. Pyramid skylights illuminate the galleries while a staircase descends to a lower courtyard, creating a composition of geometric shapes that deliberately contrasts with the nearby glass and steel towers. The institution also operates a second location, the Geffen Contemporary (originally called "The Temporary Contemporary"), housed in a former warehouse in the Little Tokyo neighborhood. The institution is managed as a nonprofit organization.