The Museum of Contemporary Art

MOCA presents Mickalene Thomas: Do I Look Like a Lady?, an exhibition of new and recent work by New York–based artist Mickalene Thomas. For this exhibition, Thomas has created a group of silkscreened portraits to be featured alongside an installation inspired by 1970s domestic interiors, and a two-channel video that weaves together a chorus of […]

Doug Aitken’s first North American survey is organized as a full collaboration and dialogue with the artist. From his breakthrough installation diamond sea (1997) to his most recent event-based work Black Mirror (2011), the exhibition unfolds around the major moving-image installations that articulate his thematic interest in environmental and post-industrial decay, urban abandonment, and the […]

MOCA presents R. H. Quaytman, Morning: Chapter 30, the first major museum survey of work by New York–based artist R. H. Quaytman, organized by MOCA Senior Curator Bennett Simpson. Consisting primarily of oil painting and silkscreen on precisely constructed wood panels, Quaytman’s expansive and ongoing project is organized into site-specific exhibitions that she calls “chapters.” […]

Los Angeles–based artist Lari Pittman is known for exquisite, meticulously layered paintings that play with diverse visual idioms culled from art history, folk culture, decorative traditions, and advertising. He approaches those realms democratically and non-hierarchically, with disregard for the binaries of high and low, masculine and feminine, and center and margin. Pittman discusses Kerry James […]

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry is his first major retrospective in the United States, and includes nearly 80 paintings, all of which contain images of Black subjects going about their daily business, presented with utter equality and humanity. A deeply accomplished artist, who makes ravishing paintings, Marshall’s strategy was three fold. First, as a young artist […]

Chicago-based artist Kerry James Marshall and MOCA Chief Curator Helen Molesworth engage in conversation on the occasion of Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, Marshall’s first major retrospective in the United States. As a young artist, Marshall decided to paint only Black figures, unequivocally pursuing Black beauty in an attempt to infiltrate the traditionally white space of […]

MOCA presents Rick Owens: Furniture, an exhibition of work by renowned Paris-based fashion and furniture designer Rick Owens. The exhibition includes recent furniture, a new group of large-scale sculptures, and videos by Owens, alongside a selection of works by the late artist and musician Steven Parrino. Best known for the iconic, eponymous clothing label he […]

Winner of two American Book Awards, Sesshu Foster is the author of Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook. He is currently collaborating on a novel, The East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines, a History, with Arturo Romo, whose collaborative mixed-media works and drawings explore fluency, agency, and folly. These readings are part of a […]

Bay Area poet Brandon Brown, author of The Good Life and Top 40. Brown is an editor at Krupskaya, and his writing has appeared in Art in America, Open Space, Art Practical, Fanzine, and Best American Experimental Writing 2016. This reading is part of a series presented in conjunction with the exhibition storefront: THIS KNOWN […]

Arthur Jafa and Helen Molesworth discuss Arthur Jafa: Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, the West Coast premiere of the artist, director, and award-winning cinematographer’s new video. Set to Kanye West’s gospel-inspired hip-hop track “Ultralight Beam,” the video traces African-American identity through a vast spectrum of contemporary imagery. Jafa and Molesworth address the […]