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General admission to MOCA is free courtesy of Carolyn Clark Powers.

MOCA Grand Avenue Schedule:
Talking Tours (12:30pm, 1:30pm [Spanish], 2:30pm)
Led by our team of knowledgeable educators, MOCA’s Talking Tours are a great way to connect to contemporary art for free. Each tour is designed to provide visitors with the opportunity to discuss, ask questions, and dive deeper into the works on view. Through these tours, our goal is to engage visitors, while expanding their appreciation and understanding of art. No reservations necessary!

Ribbon Cutting Ceremony (1pm)

MOCA Store Sidewalk Sale (All Day) 
MOCA Store’s sidewalk sale takes over the plaza with great finds at discounted prices! Enjoy sale prices on many MOCA Store items, including out-of-print books, art prints, fine jewelry, home accents, and other unique gifts.Discounts range from 50-90% off. All sales are final, no further discounts apply.

Screening: Ulysses Jenkins, Dream City (All Day) 
One of MOCA’s recent acquisitions, Jenkins's Dream City video work will be on loop inside the Ahmanson Auditorium at MOCA Grand Avenue. A video companion to a twenty-four hour group performance organized by Jenkins, Dream City collages live music, poetry, and dance into a pulsating kaleidoscope of color and sound. Multiple characters and objects interact in a fantastical dream state, linked through a story being told aloud. With this performance, created in response to Ronald Reagan's presidency, Jenkins questioned the state of society, not only the political situation but also social, environmental, and economic issues.

DJ Sets Curated by Directory (Noon–4pm)
Directory is a party series based in Los Angeles and New York City, designed specifically as a “non-binary” space for marginalized people. With constantly shifting music and surroundings alongside a consistent policy for non-white, queer, trans/non-binary, disabled, and underprivileged people to be at the front, it remains focused on providing accessible space for dancing. Join specially curated DJs at the Sculpture Plaza—lineup to follow!

The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA Schedule:
TAIKOPROJECT Performance and Hands-On Workshop (2pm)
TAIKOPROJECT was founded in 2000 in Los Angeles, California by a group of young, emerging taiko drummers led by Bryan Yamami and Masato Baba. Since its founding, the group has been fiercely gender-balanced and has embraced the multi-cultural openness that has allowed this art form to thrive. The group continues to define a modern American style of taiko, blending traditional forms with an innovative and fresh aesthetic. Experience one of the leading American taiko performing ensembles, seamlessly combining the best of traditional and powerful taiko styles with an innovative, sublime, modern aesthetic. Try taiko for yourself with a hands-on workshop from the TAIKOPROJECT team!

Art making activities: make your own museum! (Noon–4pm)
Create mini-sculptures and design mini-installations using wire, paper, plastilina dough, and miniature plastic models. The mini sculptures and installations will be placed inside a gallery model, photographed, and projected onto a large screen. The process encourages us to think about physical perceptions of scale and proportion, as well as the symbolism and power behind monuments and monumentality. This workshop is part of MOCA’s free, drop in events featuring art workshops for makers of all ages and experience levels.

Self Help Graphics & Art's Barrio Mobile Art Studio (1–4pm)
Join Self Help Graphics artists as they facilitate a stencil silkscreen workshop, in which participants will create stencils that will be silkscreened onto posters that participants can keep. Barrio Mobile Art Studio expands Self Help Graphics & Art’s audience beyond the communities of East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights, nurturing emerging artists and making art accessible throughout the vast city of Los Angeles.

Plus enjoy games, food trucks, a cash bar, complimentary My/Mo Mochi Ice Cream, and more!

There will be a free shuttle running between MOCA’s two locations from 11:30am to 5:30pm for your convenience to experience both sites.

GOTV: The Role of the Artist
Thursday, October 29th
4pm-5pm PDT

What is the role of art as we get out the vote and build larger movements for change? In this national conversation with engaged artists, hear about the importance of voting in both local and national elections, using art to challenge and shift culture, and how we build powerful, and beautiful, movements. Speakers include Glenn Kaino, Caroline Klibanoff, Claudia Pena, and Kristina Wong. This program is a collaboration between JANM, MOCA, Made by US, and For Freedoms.

About the panelists:

Glenn Kaino
Glenn Kaino was born in 1972 in Los Angeles. Kaino's works, often functioning as poetic contradictions, aim to reconcile conflicting ideologies, opposing systems, and strict dichotomies in material and experiential ways. His studio practice includes sculpture, painting, filmmaking, performance, installation, and large-scale public work. He also operates outside the traditional purview of contemporary art, instigating collaborations with other modes of culture-ranging from tech to film to political organizing.

Caroline Klibanoff
Caroline Klibanoff is the program manager for Made by Us, a cross-institutional collaboration from America's leading history organizations to engage the public, especially young people, with history and civic participation, connecting them with the past to power our future as we commemorate 250 years of the American experiment and look ahead to the next 250. She manages a steering committee including the National Museum of American History, the National Archives Foundation, Thomas Jefferson Foundation and Monticello, the Atlanta History Center, the Senator John Heinz History Center, HistoryMiami, and the New York Historical Society.

Claudia Pena
Claudia Pe?a serves as the Executive Director of For Freedoms, an artist-led platform for civic engagement, discourse, and direct action for artists in the United States. She is on faculty at UCLA School of Law and in the Gender Studies department, and also affiliated  with the Prison Education Program  which creates innovative courses that enable faculty and students to learn from, and alongside, participants who are currently incarcerated. She''s a member, and also on staff, of the Guild of Future Architects which is a home, refuge and resource for people collaboratively shaping a kind, just, inclusive, and prosperous world. Claudia is the Co-Founder of Repair, a Los Angeles-based organization focused on the health and the disabling effects of inequity, violence, exploitation.  Prior to that, Claudia was the Statewide Director of the California Civil Rights Coalition (CCRC) for over five years. While there, she focused on racial justice, gender equity, voting rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, equal opportunity, progressive taxation,  policies, housing rights and coordinating ballot initiative efforts. She was previously Equal Justice Society's Judge Constance Baker Motley Civil Rights Fellow where she researched and presented on issues of implicit bias and equal protection.

Kristina Wong
Kristina Wong was featured in the New York Times' Off Color series "highlighting artists of color who use humor to make smart social statements about the sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious ways that race plays out in America today." She is a performance artist, comedian, writer and elected representative who has been presented internationally across North America, the UK, Hong Kong and Africa.  She's been awarded artist residencies from the MacDowell Colony, New York Theater Workshop, the San Diego International Airport and Ojai Playwrights Festival. She's created viral web series like How Not to Pick Up Asian Chicks and just launched the second season of the award winning Radical Cram School.  Her rap career in post-conflict Northern Uganda is the subject of her last solo theater show The Wong Street Journal which toured the US, Canada and Lagos, Nigeria (presented by the US Consulate).  Her long running show Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest looked at the high rates of depression and suicide among Asian American women and is now a concert film.  Her newest performance project is "Kristina Wong for Public Office"- a simultaneous real life stint as the elected representative of Wilshire Center Koreatown Sub-district 5 Neighborhood Council and rally campaign show. Kristina's current pandemic project is the Auntie Sewing Squad, a national network of volunteers sewing masks for vulnerable communities.

A panel discussion investigating access, inclusion, and the changing role of Urban Parks and Civic Space in Los Angeles. 

Thursday, October 15, 4pm PDT
To join, RSVP here.

Our local public parks and civic spaces are now more than ever under increased pressure to host new and vital duties as part of the urban landscape. During these unprecedented times, outdoor, free, democratic spaces are serving as Covid-19 testing sites, polling places, food distribution hubs, safe harbor for the homeless, platforms for prolonged civic uprising and protest, and perhaps most importantly, spaces for self-care during a time of mass public anxiety. This coupled with an increased use of these spaces of up to 70% during quarantine has put more pressure than ever on our limited public space.

Despite this increased pressure, budgets for public parks will undoubtedly be cut as a result of the economic downturn. During the Great Recession of 2008, public park budgets were cut by an average of 21% and while budgets had improved, they had yet to return to pre-recession spending prior to this latest downturn.

This resurgence was long delayed: After increasing 15% between 2003 and 2007, city spending on parks plummeted 22% as the Great Recession arrived in 2008, according to the NRPA. Spending was slow to recover. By 2013, parks represented just 1.9% of local government spending, down from 2.2% in 2000 with parks near black and brown communities suffering the steepest cuts.

Los Angeles is one of the most park-impoverished major cities in America, devoting only 4 percent of its land to public greenery. By contrast, green spaces comprise 17 percent of New York City and 9 percent of Boston (where 97 percent of the city's children have immediate access to a park - as opposed to one-third of kids in Los Angeles).

For these reasons, we at MOCA thought it was time to host a discussion. In the coming weeks, MOCA will focus its programming on outdoor art in public, and in doing so also call attention to the spaces that host these artworks and how they make work in tandem to create civic discourse. On October 15, we assembled a panel of individuals who are committed to the civic ideals represented by democratic public space and we invited them here to discuss how they are working to achieve their vision.

Panelists:

Julia Meltzer
Julia Meltzer is a filmmaker and the founding director of Clockshop. Clockshop believes in the power of contemporary art to connect people to the land on which they live. Through commissions of new artworks and programs Clockshops works collaboratively to catalyze larger institutions. As a filmmaker, Julia's work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, the Sharjah Biennial, and toured with the Sundance Film Forward Program. Her most recent film, Dalya's Other Country (2017) was broadcast on POV on PBS. Meltzer is a recipient of a John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and was a Senior Fulbright Fellow in Damascus, Syria.

Jessica Henson
Jessica Henson is a landscape architect at OLIN where she is currently the project manager for the 2020 Los Angeles County LA River Master Plan. At OLIN she has developed numerous planning and design projects that seek to create socially and environmentally resilient infrastructure including the LA River Index and the Rio Hondo Confluence Area Project. Jessica's other significant projects include the SELA Cultural Center, Chicago's Vista and Willis Towers, a new residential precinct at the University of Washington in Seattle, and the new U.S. Embassies in London and Brasilia. Jessica teaches at the University of Southern California and is the co-editor of the recent book Fresh Water: Design Research for Inland Water Territories.

Rosten Woo
Rosten Woo is a designer, writer, and educator living in Los Angeles. He produces civic-scale artworks and works as a collaborator and consultant to a variety of grassroots and non-profit organizations. including the Advancement Project, the American Human Development Project, the Black Workers Center, Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and Esperanza Community Housing Corporation, as well as the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County. His work has been exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial, the Venice Architecture Biennale, Netherlands Architectural Institute, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and various piers, public housing developments, tugboats, shopping malls, and parks in New York and Los Angeles.

Marcos Trinidad
Marcos Trinidad has been Center Director at the Audubon Center at Debs Park for four years, and during that time has nurtured a growing community of volunteers, youth and community partnerships; implemented a facility and grounds improvement plan; and partnered with the National Park Service to establish a vibrant native plant nursery. Born and raised in Northeast Los Angeles, where his family has lived for 70 years, Marcos has deep roots in the community. Prior to coming to Debs, he served as Director of Audubon Youth Environmental Stewards (a program of the Palos Verdes/South Bay Audubon Society), where he engaged and inspired youth to connect to nature and their community through restoration and volunteer projects. He has also spent time as a Biology Technician for the U.S. Forest Service and an Urban Forester for both Northeast Trees and TreePeople. Marcos' formal education is in geology and anthropology. Marcos is an Army Veteran stationed in Hohenfenls, Germany as part of the 7th Army Training Command, the Army's largest overseas training command and served as a 19D Cavalry scout, Forward Observer.

Image credit: "Beautiful Westlake Park, Los Angeles, California" by Boston Public Library.

Dear MOCA friends and neighbors,
 
The museum has been actively monitoring the COVID-19 situation and we have been in touch with local authorities and our peer institutions as developments about the virus unfold in Los Angeles County.
 
In the interest of protecting the health and wellbeing of our staff and visitors, as well as helping inhibit the spread of the COVID-19 virus, we have decided to temporarily close both the MOCA Grand Avenue galleries and WAREHOUSE at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA to the public, beginning immediately. Please also note that all public programs and events have been canceled temporarily at this time. For more information please visit our news page here.
 
MOCA will continue to monitor the situation and assess the need for the continued closure of our public spaces.
 
We will continue to update you through email as well as updating our website and communicating through social media; Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. If you have any specific questions please feel free to email us at info@moca.org.

Stay in touch, be well, and hope to see everyone back at MOCA soon.

MOCA
 

Image credit: Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art. ? Catherine Opie, Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong and Seoul; ? 2020 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.