2018-19 MOCA ADVANCE EXHIBITION SCHEDULE
DÉJÀ VU AUGUST 4–OCTOBER 28, 2018
MOCA PACIFIC DESIGN CENTER
CURATOR: LANKA TATTERSALL
The lifestyle brand 69 is the brainchild of an anonymous Los Angeles–based designer whose non-gender and nondemographic-specific clothing exuberantly suggests ideas of freedom, inclusivity, and a more fluid future. Since its founding in 2011, 69 has developed a cult following for its playful and exaggerated designs. With a strong focus on transforming denim, a typically utilitarian everyday fabric, into deeply elegant garments that resist easy categorization, 69 welcomes people of all ages, races, sexualities, and sizes into its community. For 69’s first solo museum exhibition, MOCA presents 69: Déjà Vu, a survey of the brand’s groundbreaking clothing from 2011 to the new Spring/Summer 2019 collection. The exhibition will also feature a selection of irreverent and inventive videos and photographs that blur the line between promotional material and artwork.
“ONE DAY AT A TIME”- MANNY FARBER AND TERMITE ART
OCTOBER 14, 2018–MARCH 11, 2019
MOCA GRAND AVENUE
CURATOR: HELEN MOLESWORTH
MOCA presents an ambitious exhibition inspired by American painter and film critic Manny Farber and his legendary underground essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (1962). One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art features approximately thirty artists and more than 100 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and sound dating from the 1950s to the present. The exhibition is conceived as a cross between a monographic exhibition and a group show—an experiment in exhibition-making in the spirit of Farber’s call for an art of “both observing and being in the world.” Originally appearing in Film Culture magazine, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” was written as a screed against the idea of the masterpiece and works of art produced by “overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition.” Farber championed art that was committed to observation, deep attention, and the unique temporalities of the quotidian. In his words, the production of termite art is a process of “journeying in which the artist seems to be ingesting both the material of his art and the outside world through horizontal coverage.” One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art takes Farber’s idea of termite art as a starting point for assembling works by a diverse group of contemporary artists who explore the problems and pleasures of the everyday.
CAMERON ROWLAND D37
OCTOBER 14, 2018–MARCH 11, 2019
MOCA GRAND AVENUE
CURATOR: LANKA TATTERSALL
“It has been through all the phases of decline and is now thoroughly blighted. Subversive racial elements predominate; dilapidation and squalor are everywhere in evidence. It is a slum area and one of the city’s melting pots. There is a slum clearance project under consideration but no definite steps have as yet been taken. It is assigned the lowest of ‘low red’ grade.” Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, Residential Security Map. Location: Bunker Hill Security Grade: 4th Area No: D37 Date: 2/27/39
ZOE LEONARD: SURVEY
NOVEMBER 11, 2018–MARCH 25, 2019
THE GEFFEN CONTEMPORARY AT MOCA
CURATORS: REBECCA MATALON AND BENNETT SIMPSON
New York–based artist Zoe Leonard (b. 1961) is among the most critically acclaimed artists of her generation. Over the past three decades, her work in photography and sculpture has been celebrated for its lyrical observations of daily life coupled with a rigorous questioning of the politics and conditions of image making and display. Zoe Leonard: Survey is the first large-scale overview of the artist’s work in an American museum. The exhibition looks across Leonard’s career to highlight her engagement with a range of themes including gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration, displacement, and the urban landscape. More than it focuses on any particular subject, however, Leonard’s work slowly and reflectively calibrates vision and form. Using repetition, subtle changes of perspective, and shifts of scale, Leonard draws viewers into an awareness of the meanings behind familiar images or objects. A counterexample to the speed and disposability of image culture today, Leonard’s photographs, sculptures, and installations ask the viewer to reengage with how we see.
LAURA OWENS
NOVEMBER 11, 2018–MARCH 25, 2019
THE GEFFEN CONTEMPORARY AT MOCA
ORGANIZING CURATOR: BENNETT SIMPSON
For more than twenty years, Los Angeles–based artist Laura Owens (b.1970) has pioneered an innovative approach to painting that has made her one of the most influential artists of her generation. Her bold and experimental work challenges traditional assumptions about figuration and abstraction as well as the relationships between avant-garde art, craft, pop culture, and technology. This mid-career survey, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, features approximately sixty paintings from the mid-1990s to the present. The exhibition highlights the significant strides Owens has made in recent years and shows how her early work sets the stage for gripping and groundbreaking new paintings and installations. Owens emerged on the Los Angeles art scene in the mid-nineties, at a time when many in the critical establishment viewed painting with scepticism. Her early canvases upended the traditions of painterly abstraction by incorporating goofy personal allusions, doodling, and common craft materials. More recently, Owens has charted a dramatic transformation in her work, marshaling all of her previous interests and talents within large-scale paintings that make virtuosic use of silkscreen and digital printing, computer manipulation, and material exploration. MOCA AT 40 APRIL 14–SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 THE GEFFEN CONTEMPORARY AT MOCA AND MOCA GRAND AVENUE CURATORS: BRYAN BARCENA AND BENNETT SIMPSON Beginning in the spring of 2019, MOCA will dedicate its downtown locations to multiple exhibitions celebrating the museum’s 40th anniversary under the umbrella title MOCA at 40. Each location will feature special exhibitions highlighting different themes and stories found within the institution’s permanent collection of more than seven thousand objects. As one example, MOCA at 40: Open House invites Los Angeles–based artists Gala Porras-Kim, Elliott Hundley, and husband-andwife duo Thomas Houseago and Muna el Fituri to organize exhibitions that take a deep dive into MOCA’s holdings, exploring how the museum’s permanent collection can continue to educate, inform, represent, and delight the diverse and extensive community of artists in Southern California. Similarly, MOCA’s curators will create a series of installations at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and MOCA Grand Avenue celebrating the significance and history of MOCA’s collection and the artists who make it so special.
PATTERN AND DECORATION
OCTOBER 27, 2019–MARCH 30,
2020 MOCA GRAND AVENUE
CURATOR: ANNA KATZ
Pattern and Decoration is the first full-scale scholarly survey of this groundbreaking American art movement, encompassing works in painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, installation art, and performance documentation. Covering the years 1972 to 1985 and featuring works by more than fifty artists from across the United States, the exhibition examines the Pattern and Decoration movement’s defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine, domestic, ornamental, or craft-based and thought to be categorically inferior to fine art. Pattern and Decoration, or P&D, artists gleaned motifs, color schemes, and materials from the decorative arts, freely appropriating floral, arabesque, and patchwork patterns and arranging them in 2018/2019 MOCA ADVANCE EXHIBITION SCHEDULE Page 3 of 3 intricate, almost dizzying, and sometimes purposefully gaudy designs. Their work across mediums pointedly evokes a pluralistic array of sources from Islamic architectural ornamentation to American quilts, wallpaper, Persian carpets, and domestic embroidery. P&D artists practiced a postmodernist art of appropriation borne of love for its sources rather than the cynical detachment that became de rigueur in the international art world of the 1980s. Though little studied today, the Pattern and Decoration movement was institutionally recognized, critically received, and commercially successful from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. The overwhelming preponderance of craft-based practices and unabashedly decorative sensibilities in art of the present day point to an influential P&D legacy that is ripe for consideration.
THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES (MOCA)
About MOCA: Founded in 1979, MOCA’s vision is to be the defining museum of contemporary art. In a relatively short period of time, MOCA has achieved astonishing growth with three Los Angeles locations of architectural renown; a worldclass permanent collection of more than 7,000 objects, international in scope and among the finest in the world; hallmark education programs that are widely emulated; award-winning publications that present original scholarship; groundbreaking monographic, touring, and thematic exhibitions of international repute that survey the art of our time; and cutting-edge engagement with modes of new media production. MOCA is a not-for-profit institution that relies on a variety of funding sources for its activities. Hours: MOCA Grand Avenue (located at 250 South Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles) is open Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 11am to 6pm; Thursday from 11am to 8pm; Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 5pm; and closed on Tuesday. The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (located at 152 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012) has the same hours as
