![]() Without single-minded, stubborn directors, there wouldn’t be Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao (or even the Frank Lloyd Wright Guggenheim in New York). Suddenly, people love the existing LACMA that they have been bad-mouthing since the day it opened.Įvery daring museum design has faced similar fights. Now that he is nearing that goal and new models of Zumthor’s design are on view, there is a belated bellow of complaint about its curvilinear design, the amount of glass, the bridge over Wilshire, the concrete exhibition walls. He set the bar higher with a fundraising goal of more than $600 million. He chose the more difficult path.įrom the outset, he wanted the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and that decision has been controversial ever since. ![]() Govan could have let Piano continue building, which also entailed tearing down the old museum. Interior view of a central gallery, Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner/The Boundary. A collective sigh of relief seemed to permeate the evening, which was attended by past directors and curators in a gesture of reconciliation. He seems remarkably willing to perform that uneviable task. Given the spin cycle of directors, curators and board members at MOCA in the last decade, he has a lot of ruffled feathers to smooth. The night of the benefit, he spoke to the crowd about being of service, about art as a force within society, about being a family. The exhibition titled The Foundation of the Museum: MOCA's Collection is a snapshot of the staggering commitment of past directors and curators to building one of best contemporary collections in the country. On the job seven months, he was able to announce a $10 million dollar gift by MOCA president Carolyn Powers to help fund free admission.Ī benefit dinner last Saturday was underwritten by Marina Kellen French so that some 300 artists and others could attend gratis. Courtesy of the Chris Burden Estate.įour tumultuous decades later, that history is being celebrated with MOCA's sixth director, Klaus Biesenbach. Guests at Chris Burden’s Exposing the Foundation of the Museum, 1986/2019, site-specific excavation. They also hammered out the deal to erect the MOCA building on Grand Avenue in 1986. What is now the Geffen opened with The First Show in 1983 and proved that those collectors who genuinely did not want to give their art to a New York museum had made stunningly generous donations. Being a general rather than a contemporary museum, it could not, at times would not, dedicate its programs solely to post-war art or art being made here.Īs a result, a truly dedicated group of local art collectors came together to make MOCA a reality in 1979. L.A.’s first free-standing art museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had opened in 1966. When I moved here in 1979, I started writing about it because I realized that the quality and originality was very little understood or even recognized outside Southern California. This is a tale of two museums, The Museum of Contemporary Art and the L.A.
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