MOCA announces 2012 acquisitions and 2013 gala date
Last year will go down in MOCA history as a tumultuous year of board resignations and criticism of the museum’s leadership, but it will not be known as the year in which gifts to the museum dried up.
The Museum of Contemporary Art reports that it has acquired a total of 117 pieces, through museum funds and gifts of artworks or money from donors, adding to a collection of more than 6,700 works.
MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch singled out several as particularly significant: a 1980 installation donated by Mike Kelley, an original storyboard for Kenneth Anger’s 1949 film “Puce Moment,” a 1974-75 David Hammons body print, a 2012 gunpowder drawing by Cai Guo-Qiang (above), and a 2011 painting by Mark Bradford -- the first work by him to enter the MOCA collection.
One of his earliest installations, Kelley’s “The Little Girl’s Room” had been shown at MOCA in 2011 as part of “Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981.” Kelley gave the installation to the museum shortly before his death in January 2012.
The Bradford painting, “Ghost and Stooges” from 2011, is a promised gift from trustee Dallas Price-Van Breda. It was part of MOCA’s 2012 show “The Painting Factory.”
The Cai gunpowder drawing also came from a 2012 show by the artist, subtitled “Sky Ladder.” The acquisition was supported by Julia and Ken Gouw, Eva and Ming Hsieh, and Dominic and Ellen Ng.
Other donors include Lauren and Benedikt Taschen and Alan S. Hergott and Curt Shepard. (Both art-collecting couples contributed a Terence Koh, among other works.)
Several of these works will be on view in “MOCA’s Permanent Collection: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions” Feb. 10 to March 11 at the Grand Avenue location. Works from the Lawrence Rickels collection, a large photography-rich gift made to the museum in 2011, will also be on view at the same time.
On other fronts, MOCA has a new date for the gala that was originally scheduled for November 2012. It will now take place on April 20, the same weekend the museum’s Urs Fischer show is opening.
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