9-month hiatus for MOCA’s Geffen

The Geffen Contemporary of the Museum of Contemporary Art will shut down for nine months, beginning Jan. 4, to make improvements to the building’s fire and emergency system, a museum spokesperson said Wednesday.

No shows have been canceled and there will be no layoffs, the museum said, although some part-time employees will be rotated to other museum store locations.

The Geffen typically closes for several weeks while a show is taken down and a new one is installed. The longer closing, the museum said, will allow upgrades to be made to the building’s infrastructure with funds from the Community Redevelopment Agency, as part of its Little Tokyo Redevelopment Project Business Incentive Program. The grant for the upgrades was matched by the Ahmanson Foundation.

The current show, “Rodney Graham: A Little Thought,” runs through Monday as scheduled. The next exhibition, “Ecstasy: In and About Altered States,” will open Oct. 9. (The museum will be closed New Year’s Day.)

The Geffen, a Frank Gehry-refurbished warehouse space, formed the original home of MOCA in 1983, when it was called the Temporary Contemporary.

In 1996, after a $5-million gift from entertainment mogul and art collector David Geffen, the Little Tokyo space was renamed the Geffen Contemporary.

The building lends itself to voluminous shows and large installations, such as Richard Serra’s multi-ton steel sculptures, which were exhibited in 1998, or Gregor Schneider’s “Dead House ur,” a small structure built inside the space that went up in 2003.

That exhibition opened after a two-month closure for installation.