Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art

About

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) traces its origins to 1979, growing out of a conversation among LA Mayor Tom Bradley, Councilman Joel Wachs, and philanthropist Marcia Simon Weisman. In fall 1983, its first exhibition opened at the Temporary Contemporary, a Little Tokyo space converted by Frank Gehry from a 1947 Union Hardware building; renamed the Geffen Contemporary in 1996 after a $5 million gift from the David Geffen Foundation. The museum's main downtown building on Grand Avenue, designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, was completed in 1986 — his first project in the United States. The collection holds roughly 8,000 works, with the museum dedicated to collecting and preserving contemporary art in all media made since 1940.