Museum Monday - MOCA

Ever since most LA museums reopened in May, I have been visiting a different one each week. Last week’s visit was to MOCA in DTLA.

To visit MOCA, you need to go online to reserve FREE tickets. Tickets are released every two weeks.

Visitor entry times are spaced and allows for a relaxed art viewing. Sometimes there may be only 1 or 2 in a gallery.

Shown below are a few of my favorite artworks from this visit. First, the immersive installation, Chromosaturacíon (1965) by Carlos Cruz-Diez. Per the artwork description, “Three distinct rooms each flooded with a single colored light (red, green and blue) alters the viewer’s perception and transforms the experience of color into a participant event.”

Another favorite was the gallery with artwork made of repurposed materials - string, paper, carpet, plastic bags, plastic bottles, wood, steel, rope. The complementary colors and textures of the artwork in the gallery resonated with me.

Last described but viewed first before entering the museum, Larry Bell’s outdoor installation Bill and Coo at MOCA’s Nest (2019), commissioned specifically for the sculpture plaza echoes and highlights the geometric forms that comprise MOCA’s architecture.

About the architecture - I enjoyed Arata Isozaki’s postmodern museum design. Opened in 1987, MOCA seems unassuming compared to other larger and newer cultural buildings on Grand. More about the architecture and some of the reasons behind design decisions can be found at these links on Curbed and the LA Times.